


a spring memorandum

by yowler



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe - World War II, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Minor Character Death, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pining, Please check chapter-specific CWs in end notes!, Psychological Trauma, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:40:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24864700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yowler/pseuds/yowler
Summary: In the dark where no one can see, Boris presses his lips to the thin knot of scar tissue over Theo’s wrist. It’s a request; for forgiveness, for absolution, for something neither of them has a name for.“But you are alive,” he says, “you idiot.”(Theo and Boris meet during the war.)
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Comments: 64
Kudos: 120





	1. always

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _the always, our dream of tomorrow, to be  
>  more real than this country: consider,  
> the leaves of light that appear forever, here,  
> even in this wilderness, tormented by god_

**i.**

  
  
  


The bomb goes off in a crowded train car on a bright, perfunctory morning in Manhattan. Theo is thirteen. The tragedy has nothing to do with the war and everything to do with the war, although he won’t come to understand this for a long time. It’s the first explosion in a series of many.

Theo is fourteen when Poland is invaded. He doesn’t know where that is, exactly, or what _Nazi_ means. France and Britain, with their war declarations rendered in print, seem like faraway places in a storybook. Denmark, Norway, then Italy. Newsreel footage of missiles dropped from planes in Egypt sucks the air out of him, and Theo stumbles out of the theater to run all the way back to the safety of Hobart & Blackwell.

Theo is sixteen when he learns that a harbor in the middle of the Pacific ocean has been blasted apart. They’re in the middle of a Biology lesson; a girl hides her face in her textbook and cries theatrically. Everybody seems to know what’s coming next.

Theo is eighteen when the letter arrives on a (bright, perfunctory) morning like any other. A plate of quickly cooling eggs on the table in front of him, a single piece of thin paper. _Order to Report for Induction_ is printed beneath the letterhead in matter-of-fact ink.

“Oh, Theo,” Hobie sighs. The news settles heavily into the lines of his face, deepening them somehow. He puts his hand on Theo’s shoulder and tells him that he’ll be alright. That it’s a noble thing, and he’ll come home safe, which of course neither of them can know for sure.

Theo is eighteen and in two months it will have been four years. Now, as the tea kettle's whistle climbs to a dull shriek, the past and the future have never felt closer. Bearing down like a ballast, every breath dragging him back to that singular moment.

  
  


* * *

  
  


They are trained as infantry replacements at a sprawling installation in Georgia. It’s as close to the middle of nowhere as Theo has ever been. A huge, claustrophobic blue sky over flat nothing: administrative buildings, tents, barracks, Quonset huts, and dry dirt.

The recruits — all young men too, drafted between the ages of eighteen and twenty — run and march and slither on their bellies through mud courses until every muscle aches. Drill sergeants accustom them to the sound of gunnery and snarled orders, make every implicit threat explicit: _If you fuck this up over there, you’re dead, and is that what you_ _want?_

Theo learns to hold a rifle and to shoot it well. He pulls the pin from a grenade and watches it explode beyond a bank of sandbags, so much louder than he’d ever expected, and all along he knows he wasn’t built for this. He doesn’t break, but it’s a near thing.

“Must be gettin’ us ready for something big,” Theo’s bunkmate mutters after a morning drill. He’s a rough, freckle-faced slab of a boy from Virginia, and Theo doesn’t even know his first name; everybody calls him ‘Mix’, after some cowboy from a western radio serial. Theo has less than nothing in common with him, but Mix is kinder than he looks.

“Yeah,” Theo mutters. Hovering in the doorway of the barracks, they watch a long line of new Sherman tanks roll into one of the warehouses. In a few weeks they’ll be shipped off to England to wait with a million other soldiers, the future a formless dead thing just beyond.

“I hope I don’t get seasick. Never even been over an ocean before.”

“Me neither,” Theo mutters, and tries very hard not to think about it.

  
  
  


**ii.**

In the long seconds before his mother was killed, Theo stared at an elegant girl across a train car aisle. And in the seconds and hours and years that follow, it’s this that he remembers: the hunter green of the plaid ribbon in her hair, which was bright red like paprika, and the small violin case in her lap.

He doesn’t remember the dress his mother wore or the expression on her face. Hadn’t turned to her and said something, anything at all, just to hear the sound of her voice. And sometimes, Theo thinks, he is as defined by what he doesn’t remember as much as the things he does. Pippa and her violin. The metal scream of the collision. The explosion and the fire.

In dreams he sees himself inside the train car, sitting in his school uniform next to the vague, ill-defined shape of his mother, and it’s in his own ear that he whispers, _This is important. Remember this._

And later, much later, after they’re sent from the base to a salt-sprayed seaside town in England and before they’re sent to France, a thin man with an un-pomaded mop of black curls watches them file out of the cargo ship and grins.

“Christ, look at this. They sent a bunch of kids,” says the man beside him, sucking on a hand-rolled cigarette. “No idea what they’ve gotten into.”

And Theo doesn’t believe him, not yet, but the black-haired private’s laugh rings loud and sharp in his ears.

  
  


* * *

  
  


It’s in Portsmouth that Theo really, truly begins to understand the sheer scope of what is happening. What they’ve done, what they’re doing, what they are about to do. Suddenly, everything at home — the rationing, advertisements for bonds, presidential broadcasts — quickly pales in comparison. 

Every inch of England’s southern coast, transformed for one singular purpose, the first of many setpieces. Navy men choke the docks, orbiting the unfathomably large ships that crowd the sea. Sandy beaches become the stages of rehearsals: how to exit a Higgins boat, how to remain upright in water with sixty pounds of gear, how to crawl over dunes.

There’s an air of unreality to it all; the breathless last-minute preparations for a very elaborate school production. Theo watches it happening around him with a kind of mute awe. Impossible, incomprehensible, and happening all the same. When they start getting steak and pitchers of beer for dinner everybody knows what their role is fast-approaching.

“Haven’t had a meal like that since I was back home,” Mix whistles after dinner in his easy, soft Virginian drawl. “Je-sus. They really think we don’t know they’re fattening us up for slaughter.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Theo says, although he’d been thinking the same thing. 

Mix shrugs amicably. “Sorry, Decker.”

The mess hall — a large, hastily converted tavern — is loud with the sounds of men drinking and laughing. The combat veterans put on a show of how unfazed they are, ribbing the replacements, telling stories about Italy’s fascists and fanatical Krauts and machine-gun nests. 

Theo has never understood bravado, or at least never been particularly good at it. For what? Before the train explosion, none of the passengers had known what was coming. It wouldn’t have made a difference if they had. Disasters are like that. Victories, too, probably.

Exhausted, he finds himself wandering to a corner in one of the side rooms, where a dust-covered spinet piano has been pushed into a dusty corner. It isn’t much to look at, but the elegant carving of its music rack makes Theo ache for Hobie. He pulls back the fallboard and presses at a key before he knows what he’s doing, the sound ringing weakly against the hollering of the soldiers.

"That's an awfully nice piano, private.” 

Theo jumps, alarmed to see the round face of Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran peering back at him. He’s accompanied by a few of the other Italy vets, one of whom Theo recognizes as the grinning soldier from the docks.

Bunny had relished in harassing the replacements as soon as they'd arrived in England. A stranger, but Theo had recognized him all the same: the solid, rosy-cheeked superlative son of New England WASPs, languid and affected with the casual callousness of old money. The kind of person who might nurse a sidecar in the Barbour’s drawing room. More comfortable in a tailored suit than olive drab, but no less contemptuous.

Now, Bunny establishes himself in a chair by the piano and turns his full attention to Theo.

“Play something for us, then.”

“It’s out of tune. And besides, I — I barely know how.” Theo sits on the bench anyway full of nerves. He’s well aware that he’s being set up for a laugh.

“Don’t care. You’re a boot. They’ve sent you here to replace our dead friends, so you have to do what we say. Now be a good sport and play something.” Bunny passes his cigarette to the black-haired boy from the docks. His eyes sparkle in amusement, locked on Theo’s, and he nods once as if to say, _Well, go on._

Best to just get it over with. In her endless patience, Pippa taught Theo a few songs when they were children. “Night and Day”—he remembers some of that. His fingers fumble at the keys, awkward at first, but it comes back to him in dribs and drabs. Half unrecognizable of course, but butchered carefully enough to pass for a slow jazz rendition:

_In the roaring traffic's boom,_

_In the silence of my lonely room,_

_I think of you night and day_

He imagines of Pippa perched beside him, singing the words so softly, the perfect splash of her fingers guiding him through the melody. The scarring on her head and the sleepy laudanum blue of her eyes.

The last note fades. It takes Theo a moment to realize the room has grown oddly quiet. His cheeks heat up with embarrassment. Bunny, arms crossed, has fixed Theo with an unreadable look.

Before he can speak, a loud clapping breaks the silence. It’s the black-haired man. Slouched against the windowsill and smiling, but not cruelly — like he’s genuinely amused.

“Brilliant, Potter!” he cheers. Theo is taken aback by his voice; heavy with an unplaceable accent, distinctly not American. Closer to a mangled mix of the Russians from the meat markets in Manhattan and something else. His applause seems to liven up the rest of the soldiers, anyway, and Theo is relieved when they return to their drinking and chatter.

“My name isn’t Potter. It’s Decker,” Theo mutters, rushing to close the fallboard before he’s asked for another round.

The man shakes his head in exasperation. “No no — the song, Cole Potter, song you played.”

Bunny scoffs into the foamy bottom of his pint glass. “It’s Cole _Porter,_ you Slav ingrate.”

Theo shouldn’t ask. He should leave, now, while they’re distracted. “You’re not American?” 

“Don’t listen to him. American as anybody else, with papers and everything. Good enough for the Army, eh? Boris Pavlikovsky.” He outstretches a fine-boned hand, surprisingly warm when Theo shakes it.

“Yes, as far as we _know_ Bolshie here isn’t a plant for the Reds. He’s just a fool,” Bunny slurs.

“Bolshevik,” Boris supplies at Theo’s look of confusion. “A stupid nickname. But you, with the piano — you’re Potter now.”

Bunny sucks his teeth. Barely spares Theo another glance before he says with clipped, cold ease, “You know, you’d really better not name them. They’ll all be hamburger the moment we land in France.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Boris keeps turning up, after that.

Whether this adoption is by design or chance, Theo doesn’t know. But whenever one of the privates says something stupid and Theo looks up, it’s always Boris smirking back at him, rolling his eyes in some sort of silent understanding. He trails alongside Theo during drills, bumps elbows with him at meals, conscripts his begrudging assistance for the disciplinary mess duties he seems so talented at racking up.

And yet, oddly, Theo doesn’t find that he minds. If Boris has any great talent it’s the enthusiastic filling of silence. He talks Theo’s ear off about anything and everything; stories about a strange scattered upbringing with his father, a Ukrainian national who supervised exploratory mining projects in dozens of countries; explosions, death, exotic animals, salt-battered shacks along the coast of the Black Sea or in the jungles of the Dutch East Indies. How he’d run off at fifteen to ride the rails from city to city, getting into — according to Boris — “just some trouble here and there.” Theo has never met anybody who has seen so much of the world, even before the war. 

It’s a welcome distraction from the dogged limbo, the _hurry up and wait._ Bunny says it’s all down to the weather and the sea; they won’t know until the last minute. Everything rides on the Germans being taken by surprise. Theo thinks Portsmouth makes for a very effective purgatory.

Then they’re reminded once, twice, three times to sign their insurance papers. As harbingers go, it's a little obvious. Theo tosses and turns in his bunk until he can’t anymore, Mix thick southern accent from above, “If you’re gonna roll around all night, do it somewhere else.”

The air is cold and salty outside the barracks, quiet. He isn’t surprised to find Boris sitting at the edge of the docks, smoking through his fireguard duty, post long abandoned.

“Potter!” he waves, and dog-ears a page in his book. Dostoevsky’s _Demons_ in Russian, roughly the size of a brick. “You should be in bed. Tomorrow, I think, is the day. These Generals are all morons. I’m telling you.”

Theo settles on the bank of sandbags beside him. “I don’t know how they can expect us to sleep.”

“Trust me, this will be the last time. Usually, is the opposite,” Boris produces a cigarette from his pocket and holds it out to Theo, who shakes his head, then lights it for himself. A foghorn moans plaintively over the dark of the channel.

The silence between them is companionable, if atypical. Theo waits for him to launch into some story, complaint, diatribe, but he doesn’t. There’s something disconcerting about it; as though Boris is nervous too. His too-black eyes offer up nothing, caught in a staring match with the water line.

“Can I ask you something?” Theo ventures, because it’s the only thing Boris hasn’t talked about. “I want to know what Italy was really like.”

Boris snorts. “Beautiful girls with arms full of flowers. Blow jobs and vineyards every night, American flags all over. But, you know what? Not very good coffee.”

“Right. Forget I asked.”

“Am serious!” he insists. “About the flowers, at least. That part is true. When we came through the towns — muddy little shit-heaps, mostly — the girls brought them to us. Many flowers, whole mountainsides of flowers. _Fiori di zucca_ were the ones they ate. They were all starving.”

“I meant Anzio.” 

Theo had heard about it on the radio, Winston Burdett’s description in anodyne terms: the boys were having a rough time of it, the casualties were high, but that the great American spirit was indomitable. There were no photographs of the dead in _Life_ _Magazine_. 

Boris regards him with raised eyebrows, smoke curling from his mouth. “Know what you meant,” he replies coolly. “It was terrible, of course. _Bespredel,_ unspeakable. Like hell.”

“Oh.” Had he expected to be comforted by the answer? In a way, Theo had hoped for one of Boris’ typical descriptions, expansive and poetic, a meandering fable.

“Yes, ‘oh’. But you want my advice. Alright, will tell you: keep your helmet on.”

Theo watches the cherry of Boris’ cigarette light up in the dark. Out on the water, hundreds of ships bob and sway in anticipation.

  
  


**iii.**

  
  
  
  


It isn’t like the stories in the newspapers, or the radio broadcasts, or the black and white newsreel footage. In the end, it isn’t like anything else.

The beach of France is fire and earth. It’s an orchestra of naked percussion, mud-sand and red water and writhing bodies, wind whistling, machine guns belting out sounds like fabric being torn. If Normandy is the production they have all been rehearsing for, it’s an opera of two unfathomable giants. The infantrymen are ants on its pulsating back, scrambling around the hedgehog barriers that dot the landscape like enormous iron bone fragments. 

Theo is on his stomach at the foot of a gully. He is looking at the lifeless body of a man whose right shoulder has been blown away. Mix, he recognizes distantly, beneath all the mud and viscera. _Pigs for slaughter_. Mix was supposed to go home to his family in Virginia; three little sisters. _June, Jackie, Jean._ Or was it Jane? 

He can’t move. Seconds pass like minutes, like hours, as though time might stop or be borne back completely. Maybe the mortar that lands a few yards down the ravine is imploding after all; maybe it will go sailing back through the air and into its German stovepipe.

But there are hands on Theo’s shoulders, then, and it startles life back into him. He whips around, scrambling for the trigger of his gun. Boris’ face whirls into focus, white and wide-eyed in the filterless bright of overcast skies. Another mortar round, closer this time.

“Potter, we have to keep moving,” Boris hollers raggedly. 

“I can’t.” There’s sand in Theo's mouth and the tang of iron where he’d bitten his cheek going over the edge of the landing craft. He lies: “I think I’m hit, I, I can’t, so just—”

“ _Listen_ ,” Boris hisses. It’s hard to listen, hard to hear anything over the mechanized roar of artillery and the thud of his own heartbeat in his ears, but Theo tries because the hand that encircles his wrist is like a vice, bones grinding together until the pain feels more real than anything else. “You are not hit, but you will be, will both die if we stay. Almost there, Potter.”

Almost where? Theo realizes he’s asked it aloud when Boris shakes his head.

“Doesn't matter. Just stay with me,” Boris says, “yes?”

There isn’t time to answer. Isn’t even time to blink, because Boris fists his hand in Theo’s jacket and they’re up. Running, running into the deafening roaring nothing. And he doesn’t remember much after that.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Theo kills a man for the first time before nightfall. There’s nothing remarkable about it. No dramatic swell of music or elegant collapse; he doesn’t even really register his own gunshot over all the rest. Knows only that the soldier is running from one bombed-out building to the next and falters when he sees Theo in the doorway, raising his Mauser a second too late before he crumples.

Their company settles in a church when the village is finally clear. They huddle around the pews in exhausted, stunned silence. Nearly half who landed with them are gone; wounded, or dying, or dead on the beachhead. A worn crucified Christ — carved wood, common in France’s more rural provinces, something Hobie would like — hangs above the apse with a kind of impassive regard, eerie by candlelight. Chiaroscuro.

Theo’s knees, pressed to his chest, won’t stop shaking. Some of the men fell asleep the moment their heads hit their haversacks, too tired even to drink or eat. Others murmur with the sergeants about objectives over weak tins of coffee and maps splayed on the stone floor.

Theo can’t bring himself to sleep or wake. A blitz could rain hellfire down on them and he still wouldn’t be able to stand. He isn’t sure he’ll ever be able to move again.

Boots pad softly to his right. It’s Boris, but Theo jerks back anyway. He feels humiliated, wretched, unfit to be seen. Maybe this is when he’s found out: _Look at you, Potter, curled up and shivering like a coward._ Phrasing every statement like a question: _T_ _his is all that’s left in the USA? Yellow crybabies?_

But Boris just collapses to the floor next to him with a long sigh. Close enough that his side is a heavy weight, solid and warm. He shakes a half-full bottle of sacramental wine.

“Found it in the little room with the robes,” he announces. “How is it called, again?”

“The sacristy.”

“That one, ya, _riznitsa._ Here.” Boris nudges it against Theo’s fingers, bone white where they’re clutched around his knees.

“I don’t want any,” he forces out.

“So? Not for a good time. To help with the shaking, your nerves. Now drink,” he replies in a tone that brooks little room for argument, and Theo is too tired to argue, too tired to say another word. It’s sweet and stings the back of his throat going down. 

“Was like this for me, too, in Italy. Gets easier, though,” Boris admits, and leans into him.

* * *

  
  


It doesn’t get easier, but it doesn’t get harder either. Theo kills his second Kraut and then his third and then his fourth, and when he stops counting it’s a blessing.

The company fights through miles and miles of hedgerows: tall mounds of earth covered in trees and shrubbery arching over narrow dirt roads, snaking fields of grass and poppies in a never-ending series of grids. It would be beautiful in another context. If every strip of thicket didn’t conceal a machine gun nest, every green expanse a patchwork of mines. The roads are littered with the stinking corpses of soldiers and — worst of all — the German’s dead horses, stiff under black clouds of flies. They leave more in their wake. Theo learns that the replacements die as easily as the Italy veterans. 

“What on earth is a hedgerow, anyhow?” Bunny asks one morning, prickly after the night spent sleeping in a dry irrigation ditch. Everybody is on edge; the familiar sound of a Panzer tank had served as their alarm clock before fading off to some other battlefield. A close call in a series of endless close calls.

“Row of hedges,” Boris replies sagely, and Theo coughs loudly to stifle his laughter.

Bunny gives him a sour look. “Ha-ha. Christ, am I getting sick of you.”

“The Romans built them under Emperor Augustus. They were enclosures for fields and livestock,” Corporal Winter pipes up, surprising them to attention as he fiddles with a pair of binoculars. A severe, dour figure, Theo only knows Henry Winter attended boot camp with Boris and Bunny, and that he rose quickly through the ranks after.

“See, Bun? Listen to Mister College.”

Winter spares Boris a disinterested hum. “I’m going to check in with Sergeant Murray. Be prepared to move out.” With that, he sets off down the edge of the ravine. 

“Henry left Yale to enlist, you know. He was a student of the classics. It makes terrible sense, when you think about it,” Charles Macaulay tells Theo. Of all the Italy veterans, he’s the most genial; bright eyed and somehow largely unscathed.

“Yes,” Bunny drawls, “he thought the war was going to be very _romantic_ and _noble_. I hope he’s been able to reconcile that with the stench of cow shit.”

“Crazy and stupid, if you ask me. A rich boy enlisting to be a simple foot-soldier. Could have become a commissioned officer like that!” Boris says with a snap of his fingers. “You know why I enlisted? For—“

“A pair of boots and free food,” Theo finishes flatly. “We’ve heard this one already.”

Boris kicks him in the ankle. “No honor in being drafted, either.”

Bunny lays back in the grass and throws an arm over his face. “If all we have are Yale students, bolsheviks, and draftees _,_ we’re well and truly fucked _.”_

“Hey,” Charles perks up. “I've got a joke. So, during halftime at a football match, a Yale man and a Harvard man encounter one another in the restroom—"

"I think we've all heard this one too, Macaulay."

"Let me finish! So, the Harvard man fixes his collar, but he doesn’t touch the faucet. ‘You know,’ says the Yale man, ‘at Yale they teach us to _wash_ our hands.’ The Harvard man looks at the Yale man and replies, ‘Yes, well, at Harvard they teach us not to _piss_ on our hands.’”

A beat of silence follows the punchline, but it’s something about Charles’ expectant golden retriever smile that does it. They laugh like children doubled over in the grass, despite what came before and what would come after.

  
  
  


**iv.**

  
  
  


Saint-Lô is a defeated pile of rubble and ash when they finally reach it, still smoking from the aerial bombardment. A young reporter calls it “the city of ruins” and “a victory” in the same breath. Theo stares at the last few standing buildings and the civilian casualties laid out beneath sackcloth in their shade. Wonders, not for the first time, _what are we doing_ and _what have we done?_

Soon, though, it becomes a kind of guilty paradise. Told to “hurry up and wait”, the company sleeps on cots and eats hot meals for the first time in recent memory. They laze around in the hospitable July sun between bouts of manual labor, guns limp on their backs, aided by the apparent abundance of wine over fresh water. Whispers that they’ll be home before Christmas begin to trickle in. It’s a nice idea.

The postal orderlies deliver armfuls of backlogged mail while they eat lunch along the Vire riverbank, greeted by a round of cheers. Families, friends, high school sweethearts, wives. Theo tears into the first of his small stack of weekly letters from Hobie, stale sandwich forgotten.

A photograph of Pippa flutters out; her college portrait, Theo realizes. She looks happy. And safe, of course, tucked away in one of the Seven Sisters. His heart stutters and clenches painfully at the sight, all loose curls and tired eyes and rosebud mouth. He should write to her. _I played Night and Day. Terribly. But it made me think of you._

It must show on Theo’s face. Boris plucks it from his fingers, settling back on his elbows to inspect it. “This is your sweetheart?” He lets out a low whistle. “How did you manage it?”

“No, you ass,” he grits out, and snatches the picture back to stow it in his pocket. “That’s Hobie’s daughter. Adopted daughter. I told you about her. We’ve — we’re childhood friends.”

“Ah... Pippi. Girl from the train, you mean.”

“It’s Pippa.” Theo should never have told him about the bomb. It had only seemed fair at the time, delirious with exhaustion after another firefight on a nameless hill. A dead mothers club. Some comfort, too, in how easily every awful thing seems to roll off Boris' shoulders.

He smirks coyly. “So I should not ask you if she has these freckles _all over_. Doing such would be bad for me.”

Theo might have been outraged by the vulgarity a month ago, especially concerning Pippa, but the impulse fades away. They aren’t civilians; they don’t communicate like civilians. That, and anyone who gives in to Boris' taunting has already lost. “It would. And fuck you,” he deadpans. “Where’s your mail?” 

“ _Nie._ Don’t write letters. Better things to do with my time.”

“You're dad doesn't want to know how you're getting on?” 

“Hah!” Boris cackles, loose-limbed, fingers laced over his narrow chest. “Too drunk. Nothing to say to me, and besides, basically he's illiterate.” He sucks in his cheeks and deepens his voice in a cartoonish exaggeration of his own accent: “ _Borya, this month I am near mine in Canada. I beat some strikers. Tell me if you are dead yet.”_

Theo laughs, although it seems a bit sad. “Come on. He can’t be that awful.”

“Of course not, but why do you think you’re my favorite, Potter? Both of us orphans, more or less. Probably this is why you were drafted,” his explains, tapping his temple: _think about it_. “Nothing to lose, less hesitation — much better soldiers. Natural advantage and so on.” 

“Somehow I doubt the draft boards are secretly targeting orphans," Theo says. Boris never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like.

“Am just saying,” he shrugs, nodding at the little stack of letters in the grass, “those things will kill you in the end.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Something changes on the road to Paris, and in ways Theo won’t come to understand until much later.

After Saint-Lô they plot a slow advance east, the scenery of pastoral bocage giving way to a wider country of wheat fields and sugar beet crops. More bucolic scenes punctuated by moments of great violence: men blasted apart by mines left behind or picked off by enemy snipers, like Sergeant Murray. He'd been a good leader. It hadn't made much of a difference.

Theo’s fingers still shake when he pulls the trigger. But the German resistance is thin, pocketed, thrown into disarray in the wake of the beachhead invasion. When the men talk about victory before Christmas, Theo begins to believe them. The City of Lights is bright in their minds like a mantra, a recurring dream, a salvo. _And then,_ he thinks, _then home._

The air is unseasonably cool when their patrol stops to rest by the fence of an abandoned farm. There’s a lavender field nearby, a bright patch of purple on the horizon. Theo still hasn’t grown sick of the smell.

“Decker,” Henry—Sergeant Winter, now—says, “go check the house, see if the Germans left anything behind. Take Pavlikovsky with you.”

Boris, for his part, trails eagerly behind. He kicks over a few German corpses by the entryway appraisingly. “No fucking metal,” he spits, disappointed. “Maybe their comrades took it. These Nazi dogs are like that.”

Theo cringes away at the smell. He’d been horrified to see Boris checking bodies for watches and wedding rings, the first time. _Stop making this face._ _What does a dead man need a watch for, Potter._ Bunny jokes that Boris will jingle when he walks before they leave France, but it's probably true.

The house is silent and still, but it bears all the marks of the Wehrmacht who abandoned it in such a hurry. German ration boxes are strewn around a table, small mountains of cigarettes dashed out on windowsills. Theo imagines the people who lived there before, the small family that would have gathered around the now-pilfered kitchen. He climbs the creaking staircase and tries not to wonder about what happened to them.

The bedrooms on the second floor have been thoroughly ransacked, mattresses overturned in search of valuables, the drawers of a handsome old highboy rifled through without care.

It’s a childish urge that draws Theo over to it. Some small, homesick part of him that needs to run his fingers over the dulled edge of the dresser’s canted corners. Not a valuable piece, but beautiful in its way. Made by hands that passed it down from generation to generation, with life in it still. _All it needs is a polish, some oil,_ he thinks. Then things happen very quickly.

The silence is shattered by the sudden crack of the closet door being thrown open, but it’s already too late to react: Theo reels in bewilderment when the man — a Kraut, wild-eyed — comes charging out to tackle him down to the floorboards. The collision knocks the breath out of him, his head smacking against the floor, arms grappling at the soldier’s hands closing around Theo’s neck.

He left his rifle downstairs. Had Boris heard the crash? Theo tries to shout, to scream, but he’s choking and his vision slips in and out of focus, only glimpses of the red face of the German terrified and desperate above him.

Finally, in a moment of tight-wire clarity, he remembers his trench knife. It’s trapped awkwardly beneath him but still within reach, black dots closing in before his eyes, and with one single motion, Theo releases it from its canvas scabbard. 

He doesn’t register it as the knife plunges into the side of the German’s throat. But the hands at his own neck go slack, warm blood dripping over his chest, a terrible mangled gurgling as the man crumples on top of him. 

Somehow, numbly, Theo manages to push him away. Then he can’t move, can’t find the strength to get up himself; just lies there, frozen on his back, he sucks in ragged breaths until he can see again. The ceiling stares back. There’s a strange wet whistling, and Theo doesn’t have to look to recognize it as the death rattle struggle of the Kraut trying to breathe, too.

He’d had a young face. Younger even than Theo had been when he was drafted. Just sixteen or seventeen. A deserter, maybe an escaped prisoner of war. He’d had no weapons. There is nobody else.

Footsteps thunder up the staircase and into the room, coming to a halt in the doorway: Boris. Then it’s quiet again. The German has stopped breathing, Theo realizes, and it jolts him back into his own body. He pulls himself to sit up numbly as the room spins and then slows.

“Oh, fuck, Potter, where, what are you — alright? Are you hurt?” Theo can’t quite make sense of what’s being asked of him. He only knows that Boris is as white as a sheet. It makes his black eyes look huge, too wide for his face, and it occurs to Theo that he’s never seen Boris truly afraid until now.

Theo shakes his head. No, he isn't hurt. Is he? 

“Are you sure?” A sharp, cold urgency. Looking Theo up and down like he doesn’t believe it, Boris’ hands swipe at the Kraut blood on his chest in search of a wound. So close that Theo can smell the faint tang of his sweat and the last cigarette he smoked. 

“Potter, asked if you are _sure,”_ Boris shakes him, “please. Because you look — all this blood, I thought house was empty, and sometimes with knives it does not hurt so much until later, so—“

“It’s his,” Theo croaks out at last. Boris doesn’t move away. He just watches Theo catch his breath with this odd, stricken look, still so close. Theo remembers how warm and solid he’d been with the wine in the church. 

And Theo doesn’t know what to make of what happens next: Boris fingers reaching out to brush along his cheekbone, mouth opening as if to say something—

“Decker! Pavlikovsky!” Henry’s voice echoes up the stairs, sending them both flinching. “On me. We’re moving ahead.”

The effect is instantaneous: Boris snaps out of whatever daze he’d been in, standing abruptly to roll his shoulders with the same peculiar savage grace as ever. Theo feels foggy, waterlogged. He’s seized by the sudden urge to reach out and grab Boris’ bony wrist.

“You should check him for a watch,” he mumbles instead. The dead German bearing witness, a slowly draining heap of wool by the dresser. Boris scoffs, as though nothing more than words had passed between them, and leaves.

  
  


**v.**

  
  
  


It’s evening, dim and dusty when they arrive in the small town of Garches. Paris, barely a dozen miles away, is so close they can see its lights. Fireworks bursting on the horizon of a newly liberated city, heady with a budding fable: that _La Ville Lumière_ was so beautiful that the Nazis had refused Hitler’s order to destroy it before surrendering. Who knows if it’s true.

The mood in the village is only a little more subdued. Women had cheered as they rolled in, waving little handmade American flags, children running wild and singing songs.

Winter celebrates by setting them to work unloading the trucks, where an old stone building will serve as a temporary billet. The owner — a gray-haired widow — shows them where to stack the crates. She looks as tired as any of them.

 _“Pour vous, madame. Veuillez nous excuser pour la gêne occasionnée,"_ Henry addresses her in stiff, polite French. He gestures to two smaller cases of food. “Decker, Pavlikovsky, bring these inside for the proprietress. Madame Ripert is very kind to let us stay here.”

 _“Mes respects,_ _”_ the woman says. Then in excellent English: “It’s my pleasure. You and your men can stay as long as you like. Bring the boxes this way, please.”

Whatever its purpose before the war, the building was clearly a fine establishment once. The lobby is still beautiful, with well-maintained moulded panels and a long, heavy oak desk. Soldier's footsteps have tracked in mud and dirt, dulling the herringbone floor. Theo can hear them chattering and roughhousing in an adjacent room, setting up their cots in the emptied-out hall.

Madame Ripert doesn’t seem to mind. “Right here,” she says. Theo sets the crate by the desk and can’t help but notice the small stack of catalogs in the letter tray.

“Excuse me, I — this place, is it an, ah,” he blurts out, trying to recall the words, _“maison de vente?_ An auction house? _”_

The woman’s eyes light up. _“Oui_ , yes, of minor artworks. Before the occupation. You like it?” 

“Yes,” Theo nods quickly, “I do, very much. This is a Frans Hals on the cover, isn’t it?” He points to the drawing printed on the cover of the catalog; a drunken, grinning young man rendered in expressive pencil strokes. 

The pall of the war seems to fall away from the woman’s face, suddenly younger in her excitement. He feels it too; the immediate, implicit kinship reminds him of Hobie and then, achingly, of his mother.

“A very good eye. His sketches — so lifelike, like his paintings. Full of joy.”

Boris looks over their shoulders. Theo knows what he’s going to ask before he asks it, and bites his tongue.

“Where is it all now?”

“My late husband wouldn’t sell to the fascist snakes,” she murmurs, expression faltering, “so they took what they wanted. Everything else — destroyed.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.” It’s true; in fact, Theo is surprised and a little ashamed by the acuteness of his sorrow. It seems wrong to mourn the destruction of artworks with each day pendulumed by death and real, human misery. 

_Maybe,_ he thinks, _this is the only way it makes sense._ Maybe the new world they’ve found themselves in leaves no room for beauty; not in life, not in poetry or rendering. They share the heavy moment in silence, looking at the black and white photograph, considering the unspoken possibility that it’s all that remains of the portrait. Even Boris seems to understand, his eyes downcast, mouth a humorless line.

Abruptly, Madame Ripert looks up as though she’s made up her mind. “Come,” she says, already setting down a narrow corridor, “I will show you something.”

Theo follows her with Boris trailing hesitantly behind. She unlocks a battered wooden door to reveal a cellar staircase, trudging down it’s stone area without a backwards glance.

Boris stops Theo with a hand on his shoulder, eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?” he asks. They’ve all been instructed to avoid fraternization with unfamiliar locals, but Boris seems to harbor a unique distrust for French citizens. _Any one could be a sympathizer, collaborator, Potter. They let the Nazis have their country, didn’t they?_

“Oh, don’t be a coward. If it’s a trap it isn’t a very good one,” Theo rolls his eyes, gesturing to their holstered sidearms. Boris bristles and the magic c-word works its magic; he shoves his way past Theo and down the staircase.

The basement is cramped and windowless, with low wood beam ceilings and crumbling stone walls. A few exposed bulbs provide the only source of dim light, their flickering lending the space a hazy, candlelit quality. Madame Ripert is stooped in one of the corners, pulling some a small iron grate from the wall. A long-disused coal chute. She reaches in, then up, feeling for something until she produces a small, flat package.

“Here, come here.”

It’s roughly the size of a large book. Theo approaches, then so does Boris. She unwraps the canvas covering to reveal a layer of glassine, and then—

And then Theo sees. He recognizes it as soon as the paper is folded away, recognizes it like the planes of his own face. It’s smaller than he would have imagined and _brighter,_ so much brighter. He doesn’t have to ask if it’s real; he knows.

“A _maquisard_ brought it to us,” she whispers, “to protect, until the war is over. But it makes me very sad in here, in the dark.”

“May I — could I,“ Theo falters, throat closing up, but Madame Ripert nods. She passes the painting from her own slow, careful hands to his.

He’s never seen it in color before. His mother had, once, as a girl. Theo remembers with a sharp searing feeling the way she would smooth out the pages of _A Wanderer in Holland,_ pointing to the reproduction in black ink. _Anything we manage to save from history is a miracle,_ she said. He can almost hear her.

Amidst the rich ochres and tawny browns, the stripe on the wing is a slash of pure light. It’s a bird, of course. Just a goldfinch with its head cocked and black eyes peering out, tethered by a thin chain.

Any words die before they reach his lips. What can he say? That it’s beautiful, that it was his mother’s favorite? There are tears in his eyes, he realizes. And finally, when it hurts too much to look at any longer, Madame Ripert takes it gently from his hands.

Boris shifts at his side. Theo, having forgotten he was there, moves to swipe at his eyes numbly. But then a hand reaches out to grasp Theo’s wrist, not gentle and not ungentle. He says nothing, but Theo knows he understands.

  
  


* * *

  
  


They aren’t the first Americans in Paris, but it feels like it.

The bar overflows with G.I.s in a sea of greens and khakis and red, red cheeks, mingling with the locals; shockingly beautiful women in fashionable clothes and wild-haired men in tricolor armbands. Some wild club in a basement, just shy of bohemian, where the music is loud and the drinks are very, very strong. 

Even at their cramped little table, choked with all the cigarette smoke, Theo feels like he’s in a dream. He watches in fascination as Bunny wraps his arms around a young woman at the bar to say something, to which she replies with a shriek of delight. Charles, close behind them, gestures expressively at a girl who seems to have no idea what he’s saying.

Boris nudges Theo roughly. His eyes are glassy with amusement, impossible to take seriously in a dress uniform. Between the unkempt hair and his collar askew, he gives the comical impression of a street urchin in a stolen suit.

“Look at that,” Boris jeers, “pawing at each other like bears over there. No doubt the first woman Bunny hasn’t paid for! Charles’ first woman ever, maybe.”

“Well, one of them seems to like you,” Theo laughs, nodding in the direction of a slender woman in a crepe goldenrod dress across the room. She looks away and whispers something in her friend’s ear, giggling.

“Eh? The one in yellow?” Boris leans back in his chair and shakes his head. “Too clean. Girl next door type, I can tell. Besides, it’s you she is mooning over.”

“She is _not._ And you’re really saying you’d prefer, what, a prostitute?”

“No! Not a whore. Although” — a diplomatic waggle of the hand — “I have, of course. But someone like that? Too much like a doll.”

“Right.” Theo nods sagely as though this makes sense. 

It’s been a very long time since he’s been properly drunk like this. Maybe it’s the first time he’s been drunk like this. He’s grinning and it feels strange on his lips, but why shouldn’t he? They’re in Paris and they’re alive.

The band stutters into a slow song. On the dance floor, the aspiring lovers fall in on each other. Boris stands with a derisive snort and shoves what remains of their wine bottle under his arm. 

“Time to find some better music, I think,” he announces, pulling Theo to his feet.

They wander drunkenly, aimlessly, passing the wine back and forth like schoolchildren through Paris’ endless side streets and alleyways. It must be later than Theo imagined, dawn encroaching, the neighborhood they find themselves in empty and quiet. Just damp cobblestone and darkened windows, buildings towering like pristine figurines in a snow globe. Baroque, much older than anything in Manhattan, and mercifully untouched. Theo sucks it in greedily as one last sober thought — that this may be the last time he ever sees a place so beautiful — echoes dizzily through him.

“I wish we could stay here,” he breathes without exactly meaning to. 

For once Boris doesn’t seem to have anything to say. He just stops and turns to Theo with his ringed, wild creature eyes, and the smile on his lips falls away into something else. 

“Boris,” Theo says, though he isn't sure what he means to say. Whatever it was catches in his throat anyway, and it doesn't matter, because then Boris’s lips find his in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you’re reading this very self-indulgent AU that absolutely nobody asked for, thank you! It'll be three chapters. I’m finishing up the second now.
> 
> The titles and opening excerpts are from the incredible Robert Duncan poem “A Spring Memorandum”. My WWII history is pretty solid, I think, but there may be a few inaccuracies. Definitely more than a few minor instances of artistic license. All the featured campaigns and events are real, but the trajectory of Theo and Boris’ unspecified infantry company through them is fictionalized. 
> 
> Kudos, feedback, comments etc are deeply appreciated. Mostly I just hope this fandom isn’t too dead!


	2. never

_the never, suddenly realized,  
has come to destroy us, to eat up our love  
terrible calendar of days, is this  
more bearable because we dream, or love  
because the life roots are stubborn?_

**vi.**

_Is nothing, Potter, alright? Nothing out here means anything,_ Boris said, after, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. Drunken and dazed, Theo had nodded. Not because it made any sense, but because of all the things Boris had ever said that sounded exactly like lies, this he seemed to believe.

And why not? It hadn’t been an easy kiss. It had been rough and desperate, teeth clicking together with the force of it, the metallic tang of blood and cheap liquor. Like a very sudden storm rolling over an ocean, a brief and bewildering insurgency that turned any thought into incoherent static. Theo could have turned away. He wishes he had, in the minutes and days and weeks that follow. For some degree of plausible deniability, a period at the end of a sentence. Anything but the truth, which is that he had collided with Boris more easily than he’d ever done anything else.

( _Nothing out here means anything_ , Boris said. It hadn’t been easy and it had been the easiest thing in the world: hips rolling into each other, Boris’ rough palm, their staggered release like white noise. The moment after, the weight of an arm up around Theo’s neck, shaky and warm, the fan of dark eyelashes. They were drunk; this is what Theo tells himself. And it isn’t that he aches for it even now, still, with a clear head and paper-thin excuses turning to wet pulp.)

Waking in the barracks, half-blind with hangovers in the warm light of morning, Boris laughs. Theo watches him stretch and rub his eyes, watches him kick Bunny’s cot to ask if they managed to fuck those mademoiselles from the club after all. 

“Of course.” Bunny grunts, groping blindly for his glasses. “Where’d you disappear to? Missed all the fun. Surely we could have rounded up a few extra girls.”

“Cannot recall.” Boris attempts to groom his hair in a shaving mirror, but his eyes catch Theo’s in the oxidized reflection. “Potter, how did we get back?”

Theo looks away when he says he doesn’t remember.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The needle in the crook of Theo’s arm stings at first, but he likes morphine more than he ever thought he would.

Having seen soldier’s eyes go soft and wet at the press of the syrette, the way their jaws go slack, he’d always imagined it as a stupefying numbness. It isn’t like that at all. The pain registers as if through many layers of thick cotton, dampened by a sense of perfect safety; like being carried to bed as a small child. 

He’s aware of the long gashes on his leg as much as he can’t quite find a reason to care. Only when Boris pulls Theo’s calf into his lap, eyes narrowed to inspect the damage, does he think to ask how bad it is.

“Well. No purple heart medal, I think, but plenty of stitches when that doc comes back. Out of commission for a few days. Maybe the Red Cross ladies give you candy bars. Oi, stop moving.”

Theo says the morphine is nice. Boris responds with a short barking laugh, the shape of his mouth an Impressionist's stroke of red. A sloppy red lotus on the surface of a blue-veined pond.

“Can tell! Probably you did not need it — not so bad as I thought. But I panicked.” He adjusts the compressed gauze against Theo’s leg and clicks his tongue at the wound. “Was thinking it would be your ticket home. On a stretcher or in a coffin, depending.”

That’s alright. Theo tells Boris so, and that he’d like to stay like this forever. His whole body is warm. The hard floor feels like a thick mattress, sinking deeper and deeper still.

“Eh?” Boris asks. “What? God, you are really gassed.”

A distant explosion rattles the windowpanes and fades into the telltale whine of tank treads plowing up the street. Outside, the first German city is falling. They’ve been whittling Aachen away for weeks; building by building, block by block, street by street. Theo hadn’t even noticed his shrapnel-torn leg until the blood started to pool in his boot.

The deserted butcher shop he’s been dragged into swims and tilts pleasantly, which isn’t fair, because the man in the next room is dying. Theo can hear the medics trying to save him, can make out the tense shape of Winter standing in the doorway and the smear of blood on his hands. The private — O’Hara or maybe O’Hagen, a fresh replacement still fumbling over the bolt of his rifle — had only been a few yards ahead when the artillery hit, close enough for the pressure to collapse his lungs and rupture organs on impact. Sometimes a distance of ten feet is all it takes.

Theo thinks that maybe, by the end of this, he’ll have seen every way a man’s life can be blinked out.

“Hey, hey, ignore all that. And staying awake, remember? For when they come to sew up your leg.” A businesslike slap to Theo’s cheek. “Tell me about your antiques. The old poofter. You don’t talk about them so much these days,” Boris says around the cigarette clenched between his teeth.

Hobie would hate that, the smoking; they’d spent so much time removing yellow tobacco residue from the furniture. A vinegar and water mixture that smelled like old nitrate film — Theo can’t remember the ratio. Even the words have begun to leave him; when Hobie writes about his projects, _marquetry_ or _fauteuil_ spelled out in his delicate hand, it may as well be a fairytale language. 

So Theo tells the truth, which is that he isn’t sure he knows how, and that it feels like someone else’s life, and maybe he’s changed too much. Boris’ expression sours.

“Changed, how? From this, fighting? No, because—“ he gestures with his free hand like he’s trying to wring words from the air— “no. Will only change you if you let it.”

Private O’Hara or O’Hagen lets out a wet inarticulate sound in the next room. Theo should feel sad. He should try to explain it all in a way that makes sense; that it is the war and it isn’t the war. That he can’t remember a time when he didn’t know what this was like, because once something terrible happens — like a bomb on a train, or fire raining down on some island in the middle of the ocean—it never really ends. 

  
  
  
  


**vii.**

  
  
  


As a very young boy, tucked under his mother’s arm, Central Park had been as good as any jungle to Theo. A dense green mass in the center of an island made of stone and metal, the dappled light through the canopies softer by contrast. He’d run drills over the low hills of wide-armed oaks and pines at the base in Virginia, too, through untamed stretches broad enough to get lost in.

And yet it isn’t until Hürtgen that Theo truly learns what a forest is. The infantrymen give it other names: meat grinder, death factory, green hell. A massive, impenetrable wall south of Aachen, where sunlight barely passes through the fir trees that tower overhead. Old growth that breathes and bows and shivers in the breeze, blanketing peaks and valleys of choppy terrain, swallowing them up in a belly of cold wet moss.

None of them knows why they’re there. Even the Germans seem baffled by the men being thrown at their heavily-entrenched defenses, in a place where airborne superiority means nothing. The throbbing heart of the Siegfried Line; each narrow path is speckled with camouflaged foxholes, a pillbox at the crest of every slope, countless probes pushed back—a new, wilder kind of war.

The October rain is freezing, even as a drizzle, when Theo staggers into the foxhole with his chest still heaving. The patter on the treetops makes a strange staticky noise, the chinstrap of his helmet too slippery to loosen. Theo has to get it off. Can’t breathe like this, can’t think of anything but the man they’ve just killed.

“Talk about a close one, my God,” Boris says, and he has the audacity to laugh in between gulps of air. 

It was Boris’ fault. It was Theo’s fault.

Theo, who hadn’t seen the small black cave in the limestone until he was already upon it. The soldier — thin, dirty, lost — must have mistaken his silhouette for an ally’s in the mist. There had been a moment’s frozen hesitation as they regarded each other. Then the German raised his rifle. Only the cracking of a twig under boots saved Theo; Boris, rounding the escarpment with his own rifle steady in the air. 

Even now it echoes through him: the image of the man opening his mouth to say something _— bitte,_ or _warten,_ or _halt_ — but too late. Theo just stood there, had watched as Boris ran the man through with a fixed bayonet, plunging it into his right eye, flying forward to stifle the German’s cry and finish the job. No recollection of their return, although they must have run; only the same split circular seconds, blood running thick and black into a banded collar.

Now, wet with rain, the strap won’t come loose. Boris reaches out to help, flecks of arterial spray still on his hands, and Theo flinches back in a wild, violent shudder.

“Just — leave it, please,” he stammers. Finally, finally the helmet gives; it hits the earth with a thump. 

“You are angry with me.” Not question nor accusation. Grim curiosity, if anything. A cat watching a spider writhe on the floor. The kind of person who pulls watches and rings off of dead men.

“I said leave me alone for one _fucking_ minute,” Theo replies, surprised by the threadiness of his own voice and the crescendo of the pulse in his palms. Terror lighting the match of rage, unfocused but somehow easier.

“Why? You are angry. So say it,” Boris challenges. Black, watchful eyes, always so fucking intense. Theo wants to scream. He wants to run out of the hole and into the German line, for all of this — the cold wet, the wire-taut fear, the killing — to end. Anything but being trapped here with Boris, so close, knees almost touching in a ready-made grave. 

“We could have taken him prisoner.” The words taste like acid and do nothing but punch more air from his lungs. 

This has been happening, lately; spasms of panic that send him reeling at every sound and movement, skin that feels tight enough to split open. Echoes of nights at the Barbours in those split-frayed final years of his childhood. Waking up doused in sweat and shivering to pieces.

“Just now?” Boris draws the words out slowly, has the nerve to sound surprised. “Same Nazi who had his gun on you?”

“Yes,” he chokes, “Christ, _yes,_ he was alone, outnumbered, he might have — he might have surrendered.”

“Or might have shot you. Was going to. And you are mad about this?”

“That doesn’t matter, he — he was about to surrender.” Wasn’t he? Theo can't say, anymore. Isn’t this what they’ve been doing all along? Isn’t Boris right?

Forbearing, as though reasoning with a child, as though it makes any sense at all, Boris says, “Potter. He would have killed you. Would not just let us capture him. I saved your life.”

“I never asked you to, I never...” Theo squeezes his eyes shut because that’s worse, and how does Boris not understand that? “It was—it was wrong, and he’s dead now. Just another _fucking_ dead man—“

Theo slams his mouth shut to stop the wobbling, hysteric words from coming. Is humiliated to feel hot tears prickling his eyelashes, and turns his head away like it will make a difference when he’s seen for what he is. _Coward. Crying over a Kraut, and how many of our own comrades have you watched die?_

But the blow doesn’t come.

“Yes. Is wrong,” Boris says instead. “They tell us it isn’t, killing and not murder, because murder happens to people and they are animals. Higher purpose and all that. But still — terrible thing. Good and terrible both.”

There’s a shuffling sound as he comes close, slotting into the cramped space beside like he belongs there. And God, maybe he does. The paradox Theo has carried for years, _good and terrible both,_ that letting somebody in means breaking apart, annihilation, entropy.

Boris grasps his hand. Carefully, almost gently, his thumb slides beneath Theo’s sleeve to trace the faintly mottled skin, along the edge of the burn that runs over brachioradialis and into a fragile valley of tendons. The only relic of the train wreck, pale from so many years hidden under school uniforms, suits, olive drab fatigues. The kind of mark somebody would have to be looking for to notice. A cicatrix, a secret monument, the thinnest barrier point between the world and the whole catastrophe of him.

In the dark where no one can see them, Boris presses his lips to the thin knot of scar tissue over Theo’s wrist. It’s a request; for forgiveness, for absolution, for something neither of them has a name for.

“But you are alive,” he says, “you idiot.”

And finally, inevitably, Theo does come apart. He’s the one who reaches out like a drowning man to crush their mouths together, and Boris — Boris just folds into him like another foregone conclusion. 

It isn’t like Paris. There’s none of the senseless, frenzied roughness, the lamplit lenient blur of alcohol, or the bewilderment. Perhaps there aren’t words for what it is. A kiss and not a kiss. Something slotting together and something breaking, a tugging of the invisible tether between them more frightening than anything else. Boris’ hand in his hair a ballast, a thin chain around the leg of a goldfinch, a symbol of faith sprung up from the unintelligible nothing. A contradiction that rhymes.

It's the answer he'd been looking for in Aachen. That it isn't the war that changed him, but this. Theo is drawn back (before, now, whenever he closes his eyes) to the weight of _The Goldfinch_ in his hands, the invisible stain it left under his skin, and how touching Boris has always felt the same; more real than anything else.

* * *

  
  


Late autumn carries the first frost on its back, and days resign themselves to weeks. More foxholes dug and camps erected under cover of darkness, and the ever-present long clouds of mist. Theo learns to hold his breath, and that mud muffles his footsteps more readily than fallen leaves. The rain turns unsteadily to sleet, sending a rasping, hacking flu through their line like dominoes. Less worried about their health than dry coughs giving away their positions, the brass rounds the sick men up to be sent to an aid station at the rear. 

“Potter. Don’t get too comfort-able,” instructs Boris as he climbs into the truck, hoarse and miserable but somehow sharpened by fever. “Will be back as soon as they let me.”

What he means, in a silent way, is something else. Because things have changed and they haven’t talked about it, not in the light of day: the wordlessness with which Boris wraps himself around Theo after dark, the way they put their hands on each other. (It’s as senseless as any other part of the war. It’s the only thing keeping his panic from spinning out.)

“Sure,” Theo replies evenly, “I’ll do my best.” 

Watching the jeep pull away, he finds himself seized by a sudden fit of adrenaline and the irrational urge to dash after it. There’s a foreboding quality to the separation, having spent every waking hour of so many months mixed up in each other, and as Sergeant Winter directs Theo to Bunny’s foxhole he can’t help but feel that something terrible is crouched and ready to strike. Something bad _is_ happening. It’s all around them; the hardwood’s cover a murky, permanent twilight, confined by fields of mines and bunkers wreathed with moss. 

Climbing along the wet ridge to Bunny’s dugout, he arrives to the furtive wet gasps of someone crying and trying not to be heard. He stays low as he climbs into the trench, and Bunny — poor Bunny, curled in on himself like an oversized child — straightens and scrubs at his eyes. 

“Oh. There you are. Any Kraut news from Henry?” he asks brusquely. Bunny is the only private who still refers to the Sergeant by his first name. Whether it’s insubordination or an expression of fondness or some mix of the two, Theo doesn’t know.

“They think they'll make another push today.”

“Well, isn’t that a treat,” Bunny replies, busying himself with oiling his rifle. The cold gray light gives his unshaven face a hollowness, cutting shadows that had never been there before. Lack of food and sleep and the rot of the damp is whittling them away one by one.

The last boy who’d shared Bunny’s trench had been done in by a white phosphorus round, howling and clawing at his shoukd as it burned to the bone. Life-changing, disfiguring wounds. So Theo understands, and pretends there isn’t a perverse, shameful sort of comfort in hearing somebody else — somebody who isn’t him — breaking. 

He decides to take a chance. “Are you alright?”

“Never been better,” Bunny snorts.

“Of course. I just mean—“

He knows it’s a mistake the moment Bunny goes rigid and turns to him with red cheeks, a twisting mouth that says, “Listen, why don’t _you_ worry about your invert boyfriend, and I’ll worry about my own goddamn problems.”

Panic hits Theo before the words have even fully sunken in. Face suddenly numb, heartbeat hammering at his ribcage, vision tilting like the ground might swallow him up. “Boris isn’t — it isn’t like that.” 

A long pause follows. Bunny just looks at him with dully curious eyes, a child holding a magnifying glass to a beetle in the sun. Of course it’s something Theo has thought about. Two thousand years ago, in the era of Sergeant Winter’s ancient epics, there were kinder words. They aren’t the ones Bunny would use. Certainly aren’t the ones that would be printed on their discharge forms. _Or a court martial,_ he thinks, _or jail time. If he’s figured it out, if he knows—_

“It isn’t like that,” Theo says more forcefully. Finally, Bunny blinks. 

“Keep your shirt on. I was only joking,” he replies, some degree of genuine confusion written on his face. It does little to mute the klaxons in Theo’s head. Bunny doesn’t _know_ , but if he hadn’t suspected, he must now.

“That’s not funny.”

“Well, it was to me,” Bunny says airily. “How is Bolshie, anyway?”

Theo swallows. He isn’t sure if this is a trap, a threat. “Winter said he’ll be back soon.”

They lapse into a stilted silence. That’s the thing about Hürtgen; no birdsong. Maybe once, Theo thinks, before the gunfire drove them away. Still, those words— _your invert boyfriend—_ rattle around his head like cupped dice. Theo is afraid, but he isn't like that. Kitsey kissed him, once, after he received his draft notice. Romantic and clandestine with her perfect grey eyes that always seemed to belong to a stranger, bathed in the yellow-lit tones of the Barbour foyer. He has read each of Pippa’s scant letters a hundred times. Could draw her every detail from memory and has carried her name in his heart, like a melody, for years. Boris falls at neither of those poles. He's something else, nameless even to Theo, defying logic or the completeness of a poem. Whatever fucked-up thing they share has never borne reason — had never meant to be externalized.

He’s been so stupid.

“Look, you can stop making that face,” Bunny interrupts his thoughts. “I know it was a rotten joke. I’m tired, is all.”

Theo tries and fails to find his voice. “Alright,” he manages. Tension ebbs out of his limbs fitfully.

Bunny picks at an errant thread on his fatigues and says, “Listen, Decker. He’s a good soldier. So are you. That’s all anyone gives a damn about out here.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


A whistling sound, and Bunny shouting, because the Germans strike first after all. Like many small apocalypses, it comes in a hail of fire. Theo has seen these barrages before, but never so close as to look straight up into the symphony: _Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,_ William Blake’s stars throwing down their spears. Artillery explodes the tree tops in horrible thunderous bursts, raining debris like knives before their long stalks begin to collapse. A scythed fir crumples to cover their trench. It shields and plunges them into darkness.

Theo doesn’t know Bunny is hit at first. He hardly knows anything at all beyond the rush of blood in his ears, the bloom of impossible colors behind his screwed-shut eyelids. There’s only the hurricane over and around them, the pulsing earth that shakes dirt loose until it covers every inch of him, curled into a ball, frozen and unthinking.

Minutes like hours pass until, suddenly, the ringing roar of silence. Then the wounded animal sound beside Theo, the smell of blood hitting his nostrils even before the smoke, and this is when he opens his eyes and sees.

With the shrapnel embedded in his head, chest, and neck, Bunny looks like someone else, something else. A figure abstracted and rearranged to the point that at first it doesn’t make sense. Braque’s _Man with a_ Guitar. 

“He-help,” Bunny croaks, "plea-ease."

Theo scrambles to press his hands over the wound pulsing the blackest blood, not yet knowing it’s too late. “You’ll be alright, you’ll be alright,” he babbles like a prayer.

Bunny dies begging for morphine that Theo doesn’t have. His soundless lips form the words and then they stop, and there isn’t any acceptance in his eyes. It isn’t glorious or momentous. He’s terrified until the end, body gone limp and still. Theo collapses with it. Other moans and cries for medics filter in through the heavy evergreen ceiling, fading into nothing at all.

Then Theo sees his mother.

She’s sitting beside him. Every detail is in focus: patrician line of her profile, glittering eyes, tiny freckle on the bow of her lip. The rail rumbles below their feet and Hürtgen splinters into Manhattan just past the windows. Bunny and Charles are at the front of the cabin. Their mouths are open with laughter, although Theo can’t hear it. The bench where Welty and Pippa should be is empty.

His mother says, _If there’s time, maybe we can go to the museum. Wouldn’t that be nice?_ He’d forgotten how lovely her voice was, and how could he have forgotten, how could he have stayed away when she’d been here all along?

“I don’t think it’s still there,” Theo tells her, stumbling over the words in desperation because they don’t have long now. “I don’t think any of it is, or — if it is, I don’t know how to get back.”

She runs a hand through his hair, combing out the dirt and twigs. _Of course you'll get back, Theo. You were always going to._

“But maybe I can stay with you,” he pleads. _This is important. Remember this._

She opens her mouth but already the train car is falling away, devouring the words, and it happens all at once.

The fingers that pull Theo’s hands from his face are gentle, and there’s sunlight again. They must have pried open the doors, somehow, to get to the bodies. He’s already being dragged out, up, away. A soft murmuring voice, which must belong to Charles. _There you go, let’s get you out of here,_ and wouldn’t Theo like to see Boris away from the line? Which doesn’t make sense. Surely he should have been on the train with Theo.

But that’s not right either, because there’s a fine layer dirt on his skin and leaves on the ground. Shards of wood and root twisting up out of the earth at the base of a felled tree. No train, nothing but the acrid, metalloid scent of cordite.

“Please don’t forget Bunny,” Theo mumbles, the words like syrup in his mouth. 

Bunny shouldn’t be alone in the ground. He would hate it, being trapped under ash and pine needles. Frank E. Campbell’s funeral chapel on Madison is where all of Hobie’s old-monied clients go. Bunny would prefer someplace like that; a remnant of the old world with its Doric columns and marble slabs, expensive for its own sake. 

Charles whispers that they’re a ways from Madison Avenue. His breath hitches. Theo hadn’t meant to say it out loud, hadn't meant to upset him. But Charles says not to worry, and that they’ll take care of Bunny, and Theo doesn’t remember very much after that.

He isn’t aware of the ride out of the forest and to the rear. It happens beyond him, in some periphery. Voices he cannot quite make out the meaning of. The fog doesn't part until they arrive at a battered medical tent. Hands steer Theo to one of the canvas beds, next to a small stove. Presently, a folded change of clothes is settled on his lap.

"You stay here, Theo," murmurs Charles. "Keep Bolshie company. I've got to go and — I've got to help."

And sure enough, there he is when Theo looks up. Boris, propped up by his elbows on the adjacent cot with a startled expression. He looks younger and smaller in just an undershirt, blanket around his narrow shoulders. Bunny had always seemed so solid, heavy-set like a bull terrier. A sharp understanding: that a single piece of shrapnel might strike through any of their arteries. The fragility of bodies and the ease with which they snap and break.

“Potter,” Boris says, brows furrowed, “what happened.”

“Bunny’s gone.”

It seems a strange thing to say here, away from the sound of heavy weaponry and men crying out, where the silence is ringing and ringing and ringing. Like it isn’t exactly true. Bunny might walk in at any moment with a grin on his broad face to announce it all as one elaborate prank, don’t worry, he’d never go out _that_ easily, and aren’t they fools to think he would.

“Bunny’s dead,” he says again, only to be sure it isn’t a lie, but he waits and the silence is holding.

Theo imagines the letter Winter will write in the following hours — of his condolences to the Corcoran family, and his assurance that their son died in the service of freedom, or justice, or anything more lofty than another body in a muddy hole.

  
  


* * *

  
  


He sleeps for the better part of two days, shedding the stupor in increments. Sweating it out like a fever. The doctor lets him stay in the infirmary tent, and uses the words _shell shock_ in a low tone when he thinks Theo can’t hear.

 _If he doesn’t improve we’ll have to send him to France. He certainly wouldn’t be the first, Sergeant._ France means the psychiatric hospital in Nantes. Theo is too exhausted to be frightened by the prospect, but registers a hazy gratefulness at Winter's objection. Then humiliation, coiled tight. Once, he becomes aware of Charles adjusting his wool blanket. _You ought to eat something, Theo._ A bowl of lukewarm soup on the little folding table and eyes that are bright blue with grief. _We buried Bun. I’m sorry you couldn’t make it. It's all so horrible._

More than once Theo drifts awake to find Boris perched on the edge of his cot, reading aloud from a book about a French department store. He stops to ask Theo what different words mean — frontage, windlass, how much in ‘American monies’ is thirteen sous — and waits patiently for each mumbled answer.

“And women love these big shops. Why? Spend money they do not have!” Boris gestures one afternoon, putting the book down where he’s bunched up pretzel-style at the foot of the bed. 

“Uhm. I don’t know,” Theo says. Blinks hard and scrubs a hand over his face. “Sorry,” he adds. Theo knows what this is; and attempt to goad him into conversation, keep him from slipping into the fog, and so he tries to look alert.

Boris waves a dismissive hand — _who can say —_ around a series of hoarse coughs. “You know, my mother worked in one for a short time. Department store in Wrocław. Very nice place.”

“Oh,” replies Theo quietly, a bit stunned by the unusual tangent. What he knows of Boris’ mother could fill a thimble; that she had been Polish, a heavy drinker, and had fallen from a window and died.

“Ya,” he nods casually, but his eyes are trained on Theo. “She was very young mother—just a little older than our same age. Selling the face stuff, lip paint and powders and that.”

“Cosmetics,” Theo supplies.

“Cos-metics, right, she loved it. Got her out of the house and off the bottle! But my father made her quit, because he says a wife should not work,” Boris explains, adding quickly: “Know your mum worked. Of course there is nothing wrong with it. But this was his very old-fashioned thinking.”

“Anyway," he continues, "she quit, then some weeks later — boom. Jumped out the window. I went down to find her. Did not realize what she would look like. Body all twisted, but she was still breathing for a while. She looked at me, although she could not talk.”

Theo thinks of Bunny stuck with shrapnel. He thinks of Welty with the blood running into his eyes, and how he could not find his mother’s body, thrown from her seat somewhere in the smoke and jagged rubble. For years he’d digested this fact; that he wasn’t beside her when she died. And now, after Bunny, after this moment, he wonders if it wouldn't have been worse.

He swallows around the lump in his throat and says, “That’s terrible.”

“Well, it was,” Boris agrees. “And — is different, when you are alone with someone dying like that, in a very bad way. Hard for most people to understand. And after my mother? I could not speak for months. Me! ‘Borya, say something, what is wrong with you.’ But even when I tried to, no sound. Mute like a lobster.”

He shakes his head when Theo opens his mouth (to say what?) and continues, “Listen. What I mean is that you must not be ashamed. Because, if you were not affected, that would be much worse. That would be the cowardly thing. And me, I understand a little bit.”

For as long as Theo has known Boris, he’s tossed off shocking anecdotes like weightless nothings. And indeed it isn’t exactly sadness with which he recounts any of this, but an anesthetized solemness — as though perhaps it had hurt once. Something thaws in Theo, then, or digs itself up from the ground. A flicker that threatens to burn itself out if examined too closely, so he doesn't.

"I know, I — thank you," he mumbles.

Boris shrugs. His black eyes are unreadable but fond around the edges. "Sure."

“I can, um, read the next chapter. If you like.” Already, the book is being tossed into his hands.

  
  
  
  
  
  


**viii.**

  
  
  


“You know, they’re saying this is the coldest winter in fifty years,” Winter says, watching them shiver around the pathetic smoldering fire.

He looks as tired as he sounds. Days ago, he’d roused them with pupils like pinpricks before dawn. Every man — provided they weren’t missing limbs — corralled and loaded into trucks. _Something is happening in the east, some sort of surprise offensive. Clean your rifles and be ready for anything._

Whatever they had expected, it wasn’t the white void of the Ardennes forest. If the metabolism of time was slow in Hürtgen, Theo thinks, this is where it stops entirely. Nothing but blinding snow and more trees, taller and denser still in every direction. The staging camp sits in a low valley at the edge of a broad river, dispassionate winds battering their backs and frosting their eyelashes. It’s a bone-deep chill unlike any Theo has ever experienced; the kind that colonizes all other senses. With the Germans pushed back — for now, always for now — most of their casualties are to frostbite. Men unlucky enough to be sent in without boot liners last a matter of days, sent back out with blackened feet and amputation tags.

“Is that what they’re saying,” Charles huffs.

“Yes,” Winter replies mildly, sarcasm sailing over his head as he sits next to Theo. The severe stoicism that had once seemed so essential to him has been replaced by a kind of very alert weariness, Bunny’s death the final blunting of his sharp edges. He’s taken to making constant rounds among the men as if to assure himself they’re all still there.

“Pavlikovsky,” he grunts, “how’s that cough coming along?”

“Just fine, Sergeant. Every day in this shithole is so wonderful. Bosom of Abraham.” Pronounced _Ah-brahm._ Boris is barely visible, head tucked into the collar of his overcoat, only a pair of bleary dark eyes and a red nose.

“His fever’s back. He needs penicillin,” Theo interjects because Boris is too proud to say so, "and we're running low on ammo."

Winter’s expression is grim. “The Germans bombed the hospital in town a few hours ago.”

“But they can’t do that,” Charles objects. He bristles when Boris lets out a derisive snort. “What? It’s a _hospital_.”

“Hitler thinks it’s his last chance to turn the tide of the war. At any rate, our field medics have nothing, and it may be a few days before we can get our hands on supplies.” Winter sounds almost guilty. He pulls something bulky from his bag and hands it to Boris; a rabbit fur coat liner, Theo realizes, likely pulled off of a dead German. “Until then, try to keep your feet dry and conserve your rations.”

Boris accepts it with an owlish blink and something that could be charitably understood as ‘thank you’. The fire lets out a dispassionate hiss. Even with his knees almost pressed into the weak flame, Theo can’t get warm. He isn’t sure he remembers what being warm feels like.

“In fact — you all can have this too. It’s some sort of French liqueur. They gave it to me at HQ, but I haven’t any use for it,” Winter adds, passing his canteen to Theo. Unscrewing the cap yields a bitter sweetish aroma, summery and earthen, like patio parties and bricks baking in the sun.

Boris snatches it and takes a long, eager swig. “Fig brandy. My g-god. Must be special occasion.”

Winter pauses, as though remembering something. “Yes. It’s Christmas Eve, I think.”

“Merry Christmas,” Charles replies glumly. 

The moonlight glints off the metal of the flask. A hand-etching in neat print: _Νίκη δ᾽ ἐπαμείβεται ἄνδρας._ Theo is always surprised to remember that Winter had been a graduate student before all this. Difficult to reimagine the severe lines of his face in a library, studying another world in another lifetime.

“What does it say?” he asks. “The Greek lettering.”

Winter examines the inscription as though reading it for the first time. He closes bruised eyes and recites: “‘Victory shifteth from man to man.’”

“You scratched that on in Sicily,” Boris mutters, “I remember. We were pretty dumb kids back then, eh? Did not know we would be shifteth-ing it back, forth in the f-fucking snow.”

By some strange miracle, Winter laughs. The sound is so foreign in his voice that Theo can scarcely believe it — Charles’ eyes go perfectly round.

“I suppose I should have accounted for that,” he agrees. Then, standing stiffly and without so much as a farewell, Winter sets off down the line. They watch until the vales of drifting snow engulf him.

“Well,” Charles mutters, “I’ll take that brandy now.” 

  
  


* * *

  
  


On the coldest night of the coldest winter in fifty years, Theo wakes to shouting. He flails sightlessly at first, heart pounding with the realization that the shouting is coming from his own foxhole. That it’s coming from Boris. Garbled nonsense in Polish, English, Russian, hoarse but growing louder.

“Good god, shut him up,” a voice hisses twenty yards down the line. Theo jolts upright. _If the Germans hear — if they hear —_

“Be _quiet_ ,” he whispers, clambering blindly to hold Boris still, but it only seems to make him thrash harder. Even more frightening is the heat; Theo can feel it rolling off him, sweat dampening his brow despite the freezing air. 

_“Nie,_ no, get off—" Boris twists and very nearly clears the edge of the trench before Theo wrestles him down again.

“It’s me. It’s Theo, it’s Potter, alright? It’s only me. It’s only me,” he pleads like a mantra, until at last Boris’ wet unseeing eyes wide find his own in the dark.

“We have to go, they’re here, here in the mines, will find us, we have to get to the surface,” he insists, quieter and finally, mercifully quits struggling.

“We’re not in a mine, we’re in a foxhole, and you have to stay down, and you can’t yell. Alright? You can’t yell. Please, _please_ —just trust me. Alright?”

Slowly, achingly slowly, he nods his acquiescence and murmurs, “Theo.”

The use of his real name is somehow the most alarming sign of how ill Boris really is. Theo wonders if he can find one of the medics in the dark, if they could even get to an aid station with all the jeep tires frozen to the earth. And for what? There’s still no penicillin, not until the planes can make it up into the thin air for a supply drop. They might as well be shipwrecked on a very cold island.

“Yes, that’s right,” Theo breathes. He keeps his arms tight around Boris, pulls him to his chest in case he tries to run off again. An indistinct memory tugs; Theo's mother wrapping him in blankets when he was very small, cradling him in her lap during a bout of bronchitis.

“Potter,” Boris prods. More coherent now, although Theo doesn’t expect him to ask: “Have you been to California?”

“No, I never have. You should try to sleep.”

Boris shakes his head and his frost-stiff hair tickles Theo’s chin. “Can’t,” he croaks. Shivering badly now, a result of fever or the sweat cooling on his skin or both. _Maybe this is it,_ Theo thinks. It’s so cold. Snow floating with the wind to dust them, tiny figures dug into a diorama.

“Shhh. You are worrying too loud,” Boris mutters. “Is fine. We will go to California, after this — someplace warm like that. P-palm trees, movie stars. Cotton candies. Or maybe an island, huh?”

“Sure. An island sounds nice.” The words come half-mindlessly with exhaustion, but Theo can pretend he believes them. Can pretend that it isn’t more likely they’ll succumb to sickness or be blasted apart by a tank in their ready-made graves.

“Liar.” Amused and soft, almost drunken: “Is my fault. Like poem with the spider… _Moja śliczna mucha, pozwolę ci odejść.”_

Boris is asleep before Theo can ask what that means. The moaning winds carry voices up the valley and through the trees. He thinks he hears Bunny’s laughter once, and then — deliriously, distantly — the alto humming of his mother in the kitchen, wooden spoon stirring with the scent of pancakes. Hobie’s crackling recording of one of Pippa’s violin solos ( _Ständchen_ , Schubert) before the accident. 

Theo stays awake. Counts each of Boris’ inhales and exhales like a metronome, a time bomb, a Hail Mary. But when the sky brightens, blues shifting to pale pink, Theo hears it: a dull humming that rises to a buzz and the small black shapes of American bombers above the treetops. Like sitting in a projection booth, he watches the distant German line explode beneath a cloudless horizon.

  
  
  


**ix.**

  
  


Theo hadn’t known it then, but the Ardennes had marked the beginning of the end.

The Germans retreat into the Ruhr valley and keep retreating. In patches and then en masse, they begin to surrender. Whispers of victory and the final days of the Third Reich, rise and linger on the air of the new year. Theo knows not to trust it. And yet, as they walk and drive past mile upon mile of men marching with their hands in the air, the dull sense of entering an epilogue grows.

He knows he should be happy, should be relieved. Maybe that part comes later. It’s not that Theo misses the recoil of his rifle or the smooth wooden weight of a grenade stick in his hand. It’s just that he isn’t sure he knows anything else, anymore. And maybe that part comes later, too. Maybe he’ll remember how to fall asleep without the feeling of Boris pressed against him, the reassuring rise and fall of his sternum under Theo’s fingertips in the seclusion of a foxhole. 

Theo doesn’t miss it. He tells himself he doesn’t, and when Boris pushes him against the wall in an empty observation tower he pretends to be surprised. They haven’t seen the inside of a foxhole in months. It’s dangerous, the way he puts his mouth to Theo’s neck. A window cuts a long rectangle of midday light and drifted snow across the floor, melting in places. An early spring.

“Boris,” Theo says, and if it was meant to be an objection it's extinguished by hurried hands at his belt. 

“Is just us,” Boris murmurs, lips and teeth brushing along the obtuse angle of Theo’s jaw like a question mark. “Can I—“

 _Yes_ , Theo thinks, _anything._ He nods jerkily without knowing what exactly he’s agreeing to. But then Boris sinks to his knees, and Theo isn’t a child; he’d seen the obscene cabinet cards boys passed around in school, the dirty drawings in old Tijuana bibles. Always with women. Blushing and demure as though even they were a little scandalized. Never raw-boned GIs, and certainly never with Theo. 

His heart hammers narrowly in his throat. Not fear, not even the low-grade panic that stalks from place to place, that waits in the rafters ready to sneak up on him later: _if anyone knew,_ and _does anyone know,_ and _there are words for men who…_ Hands on Theo where he’s achingly hard, embarrassing until even that is subsumed by naked want. And now—

Now, Boris wraps his mouth around Theo, and everything about it is warm, blooming and coming apart and back together, sweet and unlike anything else. Theo’s gut somersaults as he runs his fingers through ragged black hair and tugs, just hard enough, the way that makes Boris shiver with a strange little sound that Theo will wonder about later, if he’s the only other person who knows it. 

There is a thrill in being wanted. Kitsey had implied it once or twice, but perfunctorily; the practiced eyelash batting and lingering touches of a beautiful girl trying something on. Boris has never vocalized it — neither of them do, exactly — but the desire is written in each urgent gesture like an iron being struck, sparks flying.

Theo’s own breath shudders out in gasps, eyes squeezed shut as Boris’ mouth sets a steady pace. The cold stone against his back is the only thing holding him up. There isn’t time, not when they’re due to return from patrol any minute, but Theo’s heartbeat quickens at the idea of taking Boris in turn. They’d only ever used their hands back in the slit trench of Hürtgen, clumsy uncoordinated ministrations with the goal of getting off as quickly as possible. Nothing like _this_. He thinks of Boris’ mouth parting around the tiny hitch in his inhales, always oddly silent, and shrewd black eyes, half-lidded and glassy but trained on Theo’s with razor-sharp intensity.

He finds himself reaching the apex with a desperate string of curses. Boris does something with his tongue, warm tight palm at the base of Theo’s cock, and it’s too much. He lets himself go in one long blinding tremor, out of body, a broken moan spilling out. Sees nothing and thinks nothing until the heady buzz subsides and Boris splutters, coughs, pulls away.

“God, _shit,_ I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that—”

“Shut up,” Boris says, but he’s smiling. A full smile, the kind that takes up half his face. Theo can’t help the startled springwater laughter that bubbles out of him until they’re both doubled over with it, like careless teenagers cutting class with nothing so terrible beyond as a world that won’t wait.

  
  


* * *

  
  


In May they find the Soviets across the Elbe river. Charles is the first to understand. He grabs a fistful of Theo’s sleeve and, with a kind of dumb awe, whispers that they’ve cut _them_ in two.

A cluster of soldiers grows on the other side of the bridge. Necks craned and hesitant in uniforms Theo doesn’t recognize, a bright red flag splayed out to dry over the hood of a jeep. Framed by reluctantly budding trees, closer to a painting than any reality he might have imagined. It’s absurd, which means it must be happening.

“We’ve cut the Germans in two,” Charles repeats, this time with urgency. “That’s the Red Army. You understand, don’t you? It’s ending. I think it’s over."

The sun is bright and Boris’ grin is wide as he cups his hands around his mouth and hollers some loud, delighted soup of Russian words, and after that it’s all a dizzying blur.

Neither unit had expected to find the other; the Russians, most of whom speak no English, pull them into astonished embraces. A snaggletoothed workhorse of a man throws an arm around Theo’s shoulders to ruffle his hair like he's known him his whole life. _It’s over_ , _it’s ending._

Watching Boris with them is strange. How keenly he sharpens as the introductions give way to eating and drinking and singing, his mouth moving a thousand miles per minute. The men feed them shot after shot of something that tastes like rubbing alcohol. He makes a valiant attempt to translate for Theo at first, murmuring their questions: what is a _tovarisch_ doing in an American army unit, how were the girls in Paris, and do they have any Hershey bars?

(Other things, unfathomable things: that Berlin has fallen and Hitler has shot himself. Winter says it can’t be, and surely they would have heard. But Theo has learned enough to know when something is so impossible as to be believed.)

And, like Boris, the Russians are as prone to the macabre and morose as they are to excitable tales of victory. Some are one in the same: Theo catches snippets of the siege of Stalingrad, Zhukov’s brave men and women breaking through the German flank, blood and soil at the mercy of snow. Civilians nearly mad with starvation. Precise recipes for jelly made of boiled down library paste. A toast follows: _"Slava velikim voinam, pavshim i zhivym."_ Boris doesn’t explain what it means, but its general message is written clearly enough on the many fire-lit faces.

Theo slips away when the sky grows dark and his eyelids are heavy, leaving Boris to the crooked Russian syllables of conversation. Curled up in his tent with the pleasant muffled sounds of commotion and laughter and drunkenness, he sleeps more deeply than he has in years.

But Boris is there when he opens his eyes.

Still dressed in his fatigues and muddy boots like he’s just walked in, face as white as skimmed milk and shoulders sketched out by the pink dawn light that peels through the slit in the canvas. Theo blinks back sleep and the confusion of trying to remember where he is. Immediately — instinctually, before anything else — he can tell something is wrong.

“Boris? What is it?” Fully awake now with palms beginning to sweat. Theo pricks his ears for encroaching gunfire. Explosions, anything that might explain the dazed expression on Boris’ face, as though just now becoming aware of his presence. 

“What? Is it Germans?” he presses, although that doesn’t make any sense. They’re long gone. Boris isn’t even holding his rifle; his wrists rest on his knees, hands limp between them.

“There is a camp just outside of town. They showed me it.” 

“You mean the Soviet’s camp,” Theo coaxes, trying to piece it out.

“No,” he shakes his head. _“Gulag._ Prisoner camp. For Jews, communists, faggots.”

Silence interrupted only by the churr of a reed warbler. The words cut all the way down as they sink in. Rumors have trickled in for weeks; stories that the labor camps were much worse than they knew, starved corpses in mass graves, survivors like ghosts. Things they had uneasily discounted as pure myth or hyperbole, too horrible to believe. But Theo looks at Boris and feels his stomach drop like a stone.

“Is all true,” Boris confirms. “Worse. Hundreds of bodies, I saw, but — many more, probably. Piled up four, five feet high. People, but they looked...”

He closes his mouth and doesn’t open it again, impossibly far away.

Theo's reply is brittle: “Oh, god.”

“No. This he did not have very much to do with.” Boris' laugh is a mirthless dead sound. The fine tremor of his knees give him away.

There's nothing to say. No words adequate to make sense of it. Even here, at the beginning of the end, the limitlessness with which men inflict brutality on one another has never felt closer.

So Theo pulls him down to the bedroll. They lay like that; Theo curled against Boris’ back, forehead pressed to the clammy skin of his neck. Later, when the sun rises, they watch the villagers bury the bodies in the vast lawn of the town square. 

  
  


**x.**

  
  


It was always going to end in Berlin. There is, Theo thinks, an anticlimax to it.

What had stood for so long as a beacon of triumph, revealed as just a bombed-out capital after all; another empire of rubble carved up between the victors. The American zone is as destroyed as everywhere else. Whole boulevards leveled, sunlight streaming through the skeleton facades of building fronts teetering above heaps of dust and debris. _It’s what they deserve,_ a young private had said as they rolled in on tanks, and Theo still doesn’t know if that’s true. But he’d seen the mangled bodies at the camp by the river, too. Some things aren't for him to decide. 

For every fallen structure, another is crowded with the homeless. Children watch them fearfully from alleyways and windowpanes. The women are dead-eyed, desperate, starving things. Soldiers are instructed not to fraternize with them, but it happens nonetheless; prostitution is as rampant as reports of rape. 

Winter, promoted again to First Sergeant, discourages his men from participating with threats of castration. He throws himself into the great work of Berlin as passionately as he’d ever fought, aging years in weeks under heaps of paperwork. Sometimes Theo looks at him and sees someone much older. 

The war is over. They sleep like the dead after long days of grueling labor, waiting to be sent home. Men pick fights with the Russians and loot what they can get their hands on. One private, no older than eighteen, pulls a pistol on an officer in the mess hall. He screams about undercover Krauts as he’s wrestled down and dragged away. _Another one for the funny farm_ , Charles says tonelessly, like he’s talking about the weather.

The war is over, and it catches up to all of them differently. Theo becomes a series of hairline cracks. His bouts of panic worsen, inexplicably, leaving him tense and set off by loud sounds, or things as small and stupid as a smell. A particular squealing of rubber tires or the sight of an emaciated dog. He has nightmares he can’t remember, and nightmares that he can. These things aren’t novelties; Theo remembers those first few years after the bombing. He’d never returned to normal, but when the wound reopens it’s still a shock.

Only after nightfall, in the small room he and Boris have been billeted in, does the noose of fear slacken. Theo’s muscles remember how to relax, inch by inch, as they return to the familiar pattern of sleeping curled around each other. The space is a refuge, another world where nobody else is around to see that his bed is never unmade. When he wakes to a dark room and his breath escaping in gasps, Boris is there to sling an arm over his breastbone. A thousand drowsy, whispered words in languages Theo doesn’t understand. Sometimes they kiss blindly, and give in to fevered hands and mouths for the stutter of release. But mostly they sleep.

Boris is the only one who doesn’t break. He’s so much like the man Theo first met in England that it’s hard to imagine the war happened to him at all. Rather, he seems to bloom in the ruined chaos of Berlin. Takes quick advantage of the black market that has sprung up overnight, selling off his pilfered watches and rings. He shoves the German marks into a slit in the mattress and sleeps without stirring.

Theo only accompanies him once, lagging behind and glancing over hunched shoulders at the specter of a court martial. They navigate rowed banks of blankets laden with guns, flags, food, and liquor. He’s struck by the withered prostitutes who welcome Boris like a son, pinching his sallow cheeks as he beams back. A tall Soviet with at least four too few teeth claps him on the back, and Theo doesn’t miss the wad of cash he spirits into Boris’ pocket.

“Should I even ask?” Theo grumbles. A pair of _trümmerfrauen_ — rubble women, bent over wheelbarrows — cast them disapproving looks as they pass.

“Just one of my new friends,” Boris replies easily, counting out the notes. “Helping him change some cash. Very complicated but legal, you understand.”

Theo has serious doubts about that, but he’s grateful when Boris finishes his rounds and leads them out of the bazaar. The edge of the square is reserved for the antiques; beautiful, fine pieces huddled on the pavement like lost children. Even a trio of authentic Biedermeier chairs waiting to be auctioned off, likely looted from Jewish family homes.

“I don’t know how you can stand it,” he says. They wander onto Kurfürstendamm to a relatively unscathed patch of city. With the temperate spring air and a little squinting, it could almost be mistaken for any pre-war street.

“What can I say. Have lived in worse places. Not so bad, really.”

“Fine. Suit yourself, but I won't be coming back. I don’t even know why you dragged me in the first place.”

At this, Boris skids to a halt. He digs around in his haversack — “Ah, yes! Almost forgot!” — and extracts something that glitters sharply in the sun before it’s shoved into Theo’s hands.

It’s a gold-plated swing arm lighter. A solid and elegant design; fifteen, maybe twenty years old and freshly polished. Theo blinks down at it. The kind of thing that would be worth quite a lot, here.

“Little gift for you,” Boris nudges him with an excited grin. “Found it in a Kraut footlocker back in Aachen. Go on, look, flip it over.”

Theo does. Etched into the smooth plating is a bird—a goldfinch. Not _the_ goldfinch, but a near enough rendition. To the right of its intricate legs, in neat calligraphy, are the initials _T.D._

“How did you—“

“Ha! Well, listen. One of my new friends, man named Horst, is artist out of work. He owed me a favor. Just finished today,” Boris replies, looking very pleased with himself. 

“I can’t accept this.”

“You don’t like it? Don’t smoke, I know, but a man should always carry one is what they say. The girls in New York need someone to light their cigarettes, yes? And of course you can accept it.”

“No, it’s. I mean, I _do_ like it. It’s very nice, it’s beautiful, I just. Um, thank you,” he falters. “But — why?”

Boris rolls his eyes skyward and snorts. “Why why why, always asking stupid questions. Always beating a dead horse in the mouth. A souvenir! That is the word. So you can look at it and think, ‘Ah, now I remember my friend Borya. The little rat from the army, and that painting, my god.’ Why not.”

Theo hurries to keep up with Boris as he sets off down the sidewalk again. He's still a little unmoored, a little bewildered. There is a box in the back of a closet in Manhattan that bears out his own bowerbird instinct; a ticket stub from a film he’d loved, one of Pippa’s forgotten barrettes, a spice tin Hobie emptied to make a pie, a merchant’s receipt copy from a customer with a particularly elegant signature. Theo has never been able to see objects as just objects, and he finds himself unaccountably moved to think of Boris — more like a magpie, diving low for anything that glints in the light — sharing some piece of his nest.

“The phrase is ‘ _look_ a gift horse in the mouth,’” he mumbles, shaking the feathers out of his head. “I don’t think I’d need any help remembering you. Or the painting.”

“Good. Well, just in case.”

Theo slips the lighter into his breast pocket, warm from his hands and heavy against his chest.

  
  


* * *

  
  


There’s a lot of liquor in Berlin. Makeshift cabarets and less-than-legal bars have cropped up across the city, eager to accommodate soldiers with too much time and plenty of inflated marks to spend. When Boris and Theo are sent to collect Charles for the fifth time in as many weeks, he can barely hold himself up. 

“M’ sorry,” he tells them, more slurring than complete syllables. Something about how he hadn’t meant to pick the fight with the Soviet officer, and how he hadn’t meant to mouth off. His face is a bloody mess. It reminds Theo of Bunny, back in the trench, and he tries not to think that this is the same thing in slow motion.

(Charles drinks. To be precise, Charles has _been_ drinking; ever since France, at odd hours, the flask in his jacket always full. Of course Theo recognizes a drunk when he sees one. Knows the foggy eyes and shaking hands from his own father, and that these things don’t get better on their own. But Charles has memories to run from in a way his father never did, and Theo finds comfort in this excuse even if he doesn’t quite believe it.)

“Be quiet,” Boris scolds. “You are one of the lucky ones. Get to go home in a week. Remember? So why now? Making problems for yourself.”

Holding Charles up like he is, Theo can smell the alcohol on his breath. There’s something very wrong about the lost, glazed expression on his propaganda poster face. 

Away from the bars it’s very dark. With so many street lamps destroyed, the route is impossibly black and silent but for the shuffling of their boots. Theo hates it; how easily it jolts him back to every forest they left behind, to the low thrum of fear in his veins. Warnings of _Werwölfe —_ Nazi guerrilla holdouts, looking for revenge or glory or just more violence — have circulated for weeks. Theo has never seen any sign of them, but maybe that’s the point; the sense of being hunted, even in victory.

When they enter the billet hall, Sergeant Winter is still awake. Hunched over his desk with a stack of papers and a single light to work by, he waves them in with a grim nod. Says, “We’ll have words when you’re sober, Macaulay.”

Charles' room is little more than a converted broom closet, and they maneuver him on to the cot with some difficulty. There are pictures tacked to the wall; a lovely blonde girl who looks like his carbon copy, smiling in a school uniform. The two of them together in the next, on a tennis court in matching sweaters, frozen somewhere between childhood and gawky adolescence.

The last photograph is creased heavily along the edges. Charles, Bunny, Boris, and Sergeant Winter — still just Henry, then — sunburnt and ragged on the sandstone shore of what must be Italy, squinting into the light and smiling. If it weren’t for the uniforms and the rifles, Theo might have mistaken them for secondary school students. 

“Next time we will leave you,” Boris mutters. Theo, feeling decidedly more sympathetic, works on removing his boots.

“I _am_ sorry,” Charles mumbles, taking slow wet blinks. “Hope you’ll both forgive me.”

“Of course we will,” Theo replies. Boris scowls — _don’t encourage him —_ but tomorrow morning will be punishment enough. 

Charles’ head lolls and sags on the pillow. “It’s just that I don’t know what to do anymore,” he mumbles, eyes drifting shut. The words run into each other, but Theo is struck by them all the same. They need to go home. They will be going home, and none of them knows how to. _It’s ending_ , Charles had said. Theo hadn’t thought it would be so hard. He hadn’t expected it to feel like this.

Winter is waiting in the hall when they leave.

“Decker, Pavlikovsky,” he addresses them. “Should I be expecting a report from the Russians?” 

“No, I don’t think so.”

Winter nods. Theo is unmoored by the faint stubble on his face and how, in the dim light, his eyes look blackened. “Good,” he says. “It’s my duty to see to it that you all get back in one piece. You’re the only ones left. From Normandy. You three. Do you understand?”

It isn’t an order, but a plea _._ Theo thinks of Winter writing the letter to Bunny’s parents, and how many more there must have been, and he nods.

“Four,” Boris replies. “Four of us, Henry.”

The Sergeant blinks, not even balking at the use of his first name. “Oh,” he says, “yes, four. That’s right.”

No formal dismissal follows. Winter just stares at nothing with a puzzled expression, as if he’s still considering this fact, and the tired slope of his shoulders chisels itself into Theo’s memory.

  
  


* * *

  
  


It was always going to end in Berlin.

Theo’s ticket home comes three days after the Japanese surrender. He doesn’t have to do the math, because the discharge papers spell it out for him: five hundred and seventy-two days after he stepped off the bus and into the training camp in Virginia, four hundred and forty days after he’d crawled out of the landing craft in France with ringing ears. Sergeant Winter tells Theo that he’s earned it, but the platitude is stilted and a little hollow between them.

 _It’s over. It’s ending_. Charles is already gone, sitting on a porch swing somewhere with his sister. Theo remembers the startled look on his lightly freckled face on the truck as they waved him off. It isn't until now, ticket clutched in his hand as he climbs the stairs to his billet, that Theo imagines himself in the same position. Stepping off the gangway in the port of Manhattan and seeing Hobie. Returning to work in the shop. Eating at restaurants. A million mundane tasks appearing to him as complicated, forgotten ceremonies; the living of an ordinary life, one he doesn't know how to ache for. 

Boris is sprawled out on the bed when he enters, sharp angles backlit by the light streaming in behind him. He's reading something, and for a moment Theo thinks it's his own discharge paperwork. Then he sees the unmistakable powder blue of the letterhead, the one he knows bears the name _Katherine Barbour_ at the top in perfect stamp calligraphy.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

Theo had left the letter on his bed. Kitsey's usual communiqué: she can't wait to see him again, Mummy asks after him all the time, and there they all are thinking of him. Little minutiae about her day-to-day life. _Promise you'll come back to us soon. Maybe it's forward of me to say so, but they have these lovely dances at the VA, and I'd love to go with you._ Nothing scandalous or even overtly personal, but he bristles nonetheless.

“Reading,” Boris answers.

He doesn't even look up. Theo clears his throat. “You’re reading _my_ mail.”

“Ya,” he hums, “the rich girl. Bar-bower.” 

“Give that back." A warning. 

“Know how I can tell she's the rich one? Fancy stationery, smells like expensive perfume. And the handwriting — a real lady.”

“I’m not in the mood for this. Give it back.” Theo is awkward in his irritation, suddenly wrong-footed. Boris has always been partial to teasing, but this feels different. Instigative and vaguely like being made fun of.

“Pfft. Potter—she wants you. Practically slobbering all through the page.” 

There’s a mocking lilt to his tone, reflected in the slight narrowing of his eyes, and this is what does it. Theo's annoyance spikes into sudden hot anger; he stalks forward to snatch the letter from Boris’ hands with such force that one of the creased edges tears.

“You have no right to read my mail. That’s none of your fucking business. Just because nobody writes to _you_ — _“_

“Yes,” he interrupts with a sneer. “But you should take her dancing, Potter, when you go home.”

“Really? Actually, that reminds me. Why haven’t you gone home yet, anyway? You were in Italy, you have just as many points as Charles did." A question Theo already knows the answer to. They’re treading dangerous territory here, dancing at a precipice. Or maybe, if there is an edge, they tipped over it a long time ago. “And listen, I’m sorry, but don’t tell me you’re hanging around on my account. Because that would be really pathetic.” 

It’s cruel, but Theo is angry enough to help pick the fight. Angry with Boris, the war, his own unsteady bursts of fear, the looming end of whatever exists between them. He's surprised by how ready he is to say anything that might knock that smug placid smile from Boris’ face, to collide with him in one way or another.

“Always thinking everything is about you.” Boris gets up from the bed. He doesn’t raise his voice, but his expression is something new; a monument to disdain. “Stay for you—pfah. I re-enlisted weeks ago. No going home for me.”

This is the last answer Theo expected. He’s struck dumb by it for moment. Almost like a betrayal; the realization that maybe they never fought the same war at all. Not if Boris is willing to throw himself into it again. Not if he’s leaving. (A whisper at the base of his skull: _Wasn’t he always going to leave? What did you expect?)_

“You’re such a goddamn liar.”

“Technical Sergeant Pavlikovsky,” he answers, voice like ice. “New rank and better pay. Will not even have to look after a coward because we share a foxhole.”

 _“Fuck_ you, Boris.”

“Yes, is that it? Want to get it out of your system? Good idea, actually—“ moving close, wound tight as a viper— “because these rich girls, all prudes before the chapel. Won’t get on their knees for you and—“

Theo sees red. Doesn’t stop to think, just punches Boris _hard_ , hard enough that his head whips to the side. An instinctual apology lodges itself in Theo's throat for a few split seconds, ready to tumble out until Boris' fist comes flying at him in return.

It's hard to keep track of what happens next. They fall to the floor scrabbling and striking at each other, punches colliding clumsily, legs kicking. Somewhere in the thrashing and sharp blooms of pain, a well-landed hit to Theo's temple bolsters him with a surge of adrenaline. It's enough to gain him the upper hand, pinning Boris roughly against the dusty linoleum tile. He raises his hand and something — some invisible tug — stops him. All at once the fight leaves Theo as quickly as he'd flung himself into it. Ears still ringing, he finds it replaced only by a jarring undertow of exhaustion. His arm falls to his side.

There’s a dark streak of blood from Boris’ nose to his mouth. He’s breathing hard — they both are. Theo stares down at him but doesn't let up, doesn't move, elbow still pressed against the angular cut of his collarbone. Watches numbly as the corner of his lips twitch up. Boris’ teeth are stained red and his eyes are unfocused, but the cruel imitation of a smile is as clear as the blinding arc of a flare.

Theo reels back in disgust. His foot catches in his haste and sends him sprawling on the floor. Depleted, side by side, the two of them winded and wordless, Theo wonders if this was what Boris was after from the start. How many times he’s looked at Theo and seen the line of sand in an hourglass. If it had meant anything or nothing, another story to be told to the next person who drifts in and out of Boris’ life. Mostly, he wonders if any of that matters now that it’s already done. 

_It’s over, it’s ending. Nothing out here matters._

Boris grabs Theo’s hand and pulls it to his mouth. The brush of his lips against swollen knuckles leaves a bloody smear, a mark. Cautery, from one of Hobie’s old medical dictionaries: _to burn or scar with the fire of a hot iron or with caustics, as morbid flesh._ A root fire that spreads through the veins. A new relic.

Boris says nothing as he staggers to his feet, nor linger in the doorway as he leaves. He doesn’t need to; Theo knows well enough what goodbyes feel like. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your patience! This chapter is extra long, by way of apology. The boys-sitting-in-foxholes-having-complicated-feelings portion of the fic is complete. One more chapter to go. Life got in the way of this update, but I hope to get the final chunk out more quickly. 
> 
> Comments/feedback are so, so appreciated.
> 
> —
> 
>  **Chapter-specific content warnings** for: violence and moderate gore, minor character death, discussion of a concentration camp, use of the f-slur, brief reference to rape of civilians, sex, period-typical homophobia and internalized homophobia.
> 
> —
> 
>  **History and translation notes for anybody interested:** The camp described is based on the Wöbbelin concentration camp, which was in reality liberated by the US 82nd Airborne Division. This transposition incorporates Soviet soldiers, who would have been linking up with American troops in the area around this time. While Theo’s fictional company’s journey is largely based on the 1st Infantry Division’s combat chronicle, it diverges at several points for the sake of narrative. Also because I thought Boris would do very well in occupied Berlin’s [black markets.](https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/fall/berlin-black-market-1.html)
> 
> The book Boris reads to Theo is _The Ladies’ Paradise_ by Émile Zola. Winter’s canteen inscription is from Homer’s _Iliad._ Delirious Boris references the poem “The Spider and the Fly”. He says, in Polish, “My lovely fly, I’ll let you go.” The Russian toast roughly translates to “Glory to the soldiers, living and dead.” Info about [Werwolf](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/nazi-werewolves-who-terrorized-allied-soldiers-end-wwii-180970522/) and [Trümmerfrau.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%BCmmerfrau)


	3. again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Full chapter CWs in endnotes, but I want to note here that this chapter contains a suicide attempt. Please take care of yourself!

_the again is the sap rising under the horn-hided tree  
_ _to force out each bud to the hungry day_

**xi.**

_Okay,_ said Boris, _there is a trick to this._

They were still in Normandy then, resting in the long arcing shadow of hedgerows. Boris’ hands were warm and careful where they positioned Theo’s grip over the cold metal of his rifle’s trigger group.

_Make your fingers like a C. Little C shape, good, there you go. Hold the hammer with this one. Then the pin, all lined up and… There. Just so, see?_

Theo did see, and muttered something under his breath. What it was doesn’t matter, only that it made Boris laugh; the kind of stuttering dolphin sound where his head tipped back, skyward. His hand still covered Theo’s. Gently, although that wasn’t the word — not for nearly anything Boris ever did.

Some touches, Theo has learned, don’t bear the weight of description. At least not in the manner of their application or intention. Rather, their single characteristic is that they leave an invisible mark. There are touches that hold their own language within themselves, so full with it they linger for days, years, decades. 

Anyways, Boris’ hand on his. That’s what Theo remembers.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The war ends, and Theo — starts to spill, maybe, like a cup of water or a dam.

  
  


* * *

  
  


"How did you sleep?” Hobie asks.

He always asks, even though they both know Theo hasn't. This is the perfunctory dance, so many weeks after he stepped off the boat and into the city; Hobie hovering but never pushing, the pride in his eyes giving way to worry and sticking like that. Theo watches him make breakfast. The slope of his turned back is frailer than it was two years ago. Even now this passage of time feels unreal; like the war had only been an intermission, the curtain coming back up to reveal an unrecognizable set and cast of characters.

Mornings are always the hardest. The sensation of a slow, steady running over has taken up residence at the crown of Theo's head, like whatever container had been holding the soup of him together has dissolved. Spilling. Everything smells like toast. New York wakes up beyond the kitchen window, having already forgotten him.

“Fine,” he replies. “And you?”

“Oh, I slept well.”

A voice on the radio warbles about men still returning home from the Pacific. They won’t arrive to much fanfare; by the time Theo arrived weeks ago, the crowds had already grown tired of homecomings and celebrations. After all, there are no visible scars in the earth like there were (are, will be) in Europe. No heaps of rubble except at construction sites, where the bright skyscrapers of tomorrow wait to be built. _Good,_ he thinks.

There might be some comfort in being thrown back at the feet of a country eager to put it all to rest. As though the war had been some sort of aberrant dream, even if it's one Theo hasn't quite awakened from yet. Something that will end if given enough time and patience. And there's nothing but time, isn't there?

“I wondered if you might help me with that desk restoration today. You know, that great beast we received on Tuesday,” Hobie coaxes.

He’s being kind. The piece needs plenty of work, but Theo’s as good as dead weight now; they both know that too. It isn’t just that he forgets the words, forgets the materials and rules and how much pressure to apply to a gimlet bit. The problem is that his hands don’t always work. They go numb and start to shake in long fine termors, throbbing, full of warm needles.

This would be concealed easily enough on the sales floor, but the wartime economy — still staggering back to normalcy in fits and starts — means most of their work remains in petty repairs and refurbishments. When it all began, Theo had wanted to cry at the sight of Hobie reupholstering a chintzy department store armchair, at that first blush of indignity. It seems like such a foolish thing to worry about now. 

“Sure, yeah. Whatever you need."

“Only if you’re ready. There’s no rush,” Hobie addends. “Mrs. DeFrees’ has a nephew who helped out from time to time on the heavier jobs when you were away. Nice fellow, perfectly capable, just not very clever.”

Down on the street, a mother puts mittens on a plump toddler. There’s a holiday display in the storefront behind them; a painted Santa Claus with bright red cheeks, **_BUY A LASTING GIFT — BARGAINS!_** in brush lettering. Before, Theo and Hobie had never made much of the season beyond an exchange of thoughtful, inexpensive gifts. Pippa was always the one to sweep in with tinsel and garlands and the gramophone cranked up. She’d even dragged them to the parking lot markets for a tree, once or twice. 

So, stupidly, Theo makes up his mind to ask, “Do you know if Pippa’s coming back? For Christmas?”

Hobie glances over his shoulder with a poorly smothered grimace. “Not this year, I’m afraid. She’s going to spend it with her aunt. To see the horses, you know.”

This is another careful, gentle untruth they both know the contours of. Pippa had been so sweet when Theo came home; taking the train up from Pennsylvania, baking a celebratory sheet cake, throwing her arms around his shoulders. Theo’s reward for that sweetness was to get so drunk he could hardly stand. He’d fallen over with the wine bottle and sliced open the palm of his hand, laughter wracking his body like spasms or sobs as she used her handkerchief (robin’s egg blue, hand-embroidered flowers with a monogram) to soak up the mess.

Theo still remembers the frightened whites of her eyes. He’s ashamed, of course.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“What brings you in today, Mr. Decker?” Dr. Kettering asks.

He looks like a physician from an advertisement, with a little white mustache and courteous eyes over half-rim spectacles. The examination chair beneath Theo lets out a loud metallic squeal as he shifts. There had been a man in the waiting room who didn’t have legs. He’d sat in a wheelchair reading a magazine about cars, the ends of his pants neatly folded and pinned just above where knees would be. It’s hard to stop thinking about it, to not wonder how many limbless men drift through the halls of the VA hospital every day.

“I haven’t been sleeping well,” Theo admits. “And sometimes I — I feel like I can’t breathe and my hands shake. Often, actually.”

He doesn’t say all of it. About how he just goes blank sometimes, about the spilling. _One-way ticket to the funny farm,_ Charles’ voice remarks in his head.

“I see. And where did you serve?”

_Serve_ is one of those funny words, rote patriotism without the unpleasant implications of more accurate verbs. _Where did you serve, thank you for your service._ Theo always has to stop himself from laughing at the ridiculousness of it, the notion that he’d served anyone or anything. He hadn’t even enlisted voluntarily. But it’s everybody’s favorite question, and he looks away.

“Europe, sir.”

“It says here you were general infantry. Difficult job. Normandy?”

Theo nods. The doctor is already aware of this. It’s in the file he’s half-reading. Nobody ever wants to hear about Hürtgen; they want to hear about the beachhead and the breakout and Paris on the heels of victory. Did Theo get to the Eagle’s Nest? Or did Theo see Hitler’s body, his bunker? Did Theo kill anybody? No, no, and yes that was the point.

“All that time in active combat with no serious injuries is some very good luck. Medically speaking, the only thing I have here is a note about a shrapnel flesh wound. Nothing that would account for any hand or lung trouble. How did your leg heal up?”

“It’s fine,” Theo says. “The muscles get stiff sometimes.” 

He tries to keep the impatience from his voice. Theo didn’t come for his leg. If he were being honest, he might admit that the sight of the scars — a pair of jagged roseate lines that run up the better length of his shin — makes him nervous. That’s closer to the problem, but he isn’t going to spill from there. Theo knows it’ll be his head or his hands.

“My nephew was fighting Japs on the islands. He brought home some horrible facial scarring, partial blindness from the mustard gas, which is some very nasty stuff. Did you ever encounter any?”

“No, I didn’t, I’m very sorry to hear that.” Theo swallows once, twice. 

Dr. Kettering leans against the bank of cabinets and rests his palms on his knees in a sort of folksy, solicitous gesture. Good bedside manner, only Theo isn’t in a bed; he’s sitting in a chair with two seeing eyes and both legs wholly attached to his body.

“Why should you be? Both of you served your country,” the doctor says, and there’s that word again. “You did a good thing. A terribly _brave_ thing. But he has to live with those injuries, Theodore. And I’ll tell you, what you’re experiencing is just a hitch in the readjustment process. It’s not uncommon. You’ve just got to keep your chin up and it’ll pass, sure enough. You’re a perfectly healthy young man.”

“Oh.” A scream is working its way up Theo’s throat, or worse. Maybe if he doesn’t quite spill he’ll burst right here in this office, leave a fine pink mist and nothing else. The most rested he’d ever felt was after Boris wasted those two tiny morphine syrettes on his stupid calf. Modern medicine can’t save a man with a round of white phosphorus eating up his chest, but it can sew up wounds and deaden nerves. He'll take anything if it means he can sleep through the night, return to work, find some way to get on with his life.

So he continues, “Alright. I just, like I said, I’m having trouble working. I can’t sleep normally. Or when I do, I’m still tired, and. And so, I was hoping there might be — something.” 

The doctor scribbles something on a pad of paper, although his eyes dart to the clock on the wall. “Hm, yes. Well, I suppose I can give you something for that. Something to calm you down until you get back on your feet. How does that sound, soldier?”

  
  
  
  


**xii.**

  
  
  


Once, just after Theo’s draft letter arrived, Kitsey kissed him. 

He let her. Even kissed her back, because he wanted very badly to want her, and because she’d pressed her lips to his with the same confidence with which she’d ever gone about anything. In the foyer, waiting for the elevator to collect him, her mouth had tasted like after-dinner mints. That’s all he remembers of it.

In the years since, Kitsey has grown into the woman she was always going to become. Her pristine, well-heeled beauty merely sharpened through time’s alchemical process, the kind that sets men running to open doors, that models lipstick in magazines and weeps glycerin tears in movies. No visible brushstrokes in her skin or the fine white fabric of her dress. An Ingres portrait perched in a supper club booth.

(Has Theo changed? Reconstituted as a Picasso, a biomorph with its head split and caved, features and extremities rearranged?)

He’s lucky to be here with her. Theo reminds himself of this fact for the third time, and tries to organize his face into something present and alive. It’s just that the wine is making his head spin and his mouth gummy, on edge even in the intimate light, and he tugs at his collar. The murmur of the other diners isn’t loud, but it feels loud. 

“Theo?” Kitsey has fixed him with a look of polite concern. What had she been saying? He tries to remember because he’s here, and with her, and he’s lucky. 

“I, ah — didn’t catch that, Kits. Come again?”

“I asked if you got to see very much of Europe,” she says. “Because you know Matthew, Platt’s friend? He was a typist due to his epilepsy. Apparently he was holed up at a desk in Brighton or some other dismal place the entire time. Can you imagine that?”

A jab of annoyance sets Theo’s foot bouncing beneath the table. He finishes off his glass of wine even though he shouldn’t, not with the pills swirling in his stomach, but it blunts the impulse to snarl at her. Naturally, Kitsey would think of it all as one big sightseeing excursion. 

“Some. England, France, Belgium, then Germany.”

“But that’s amazing,” she breathes. “You must have such incredible stories.”

“Not really.” 

A beach, a church, an empty farmhouse, holes in the earth, a Paris so different from the one Kitsey visited with her father as a girl that it surely might as well be another planet. Treetops exploding. The buzzing shriek of Jericho trumpets splitting the sky in two. Dead men, dead horses. Boris, always, staring at him in the cellar with the painting.

But all these things are gone and Theo’s here, with Kitsey, her eyes expectant twin specks of jade as she replies, “I’m sure that’s not true. What was it like?”

A small jazz band (and God, why is there a band, he’d only wanted a quiet dinner) has begun to set up their instruments and stools on the small stage. Theo adjusts his collar in an attempt to staunch the nausea sweeping through him. He regrets the extra pill — just one more, to see if they work better that way, swallowed dry in the restroom. It settles as a thin layer of sweat on Theo’s forehead. Club air gone stale, crowded and rumbling with the carcass of a cornish hen, lightly picked-at and bathed in thyme, laid out on the plate in front of him.

“We were there to kill Nazis,” he bites out. “That’s all. It wasn't a holiday, a cruiseliner tour, or, or skiing in Aspen. It wasn’t like anything else.”

The effect of guilt is instant. Kitsey’s gaze flits away, the corners of her red painted mouth downturned, and Theo deflates.

“Forgive me. God, I didn’t mean to snap at you. I shouldn’t have.” 

“No, _please_ don’t apologize,” she says. Smiling as she looks up, every feature already schooled back in place. “You’re right. It was a silly question.”

They don’t talk much after that, lulled into silence as the band starts playing. The notes hit Theo staggered, droning and loud in the slush of his skull, but he recognizes the song right away. Better than his own mangled version in England, a pair of brown-black eyes staring him down.

So it’s time to leave. When Theo flags a waiter for their check it’s somebody else that uses his voice, that pilots his body to the cab and listens to Kitsey chatter about her friends, women he can barely recall. Most of them are engaged or on their way to it, like _Cathy, oh, you remember her, we made our debut together._ The pills and wine make the lights outside blur and warp into long streaks. This is Theo’s favorite part: the floating sensation, a manageable oblivion, gentle and rich until the car pulls up to a curb. He pays the fare and walks Kitsey to her door. Then she kisses him, and it’s somebody else who lets her.

“Everybody’s gone to bed. You could come up,” she whispers with a kind of breathy, practiced forwardness. Her skin is soft and sweetened with an amber and oakmoss perfume.

Beyond Kitsey is a brownstone with a dimly lit foyer and, probably, a heaping arrangement of flowers. There’s a mother-in-law and a cabinet of heirloom china, powder blue stationery, marriage, weekend trips to Nantucket, maybe even plump children to put mittens on. A king-sized bed and, every night, soft manicured hands that have never known dirt or ice or blood. A world he might still be able to fold himself into, a future he'd been so sure he wanted once. Theo tries to conjure that desire now, but finds the pills and whatever else lives inside him has eaten it up.

“I can’t, I’m sorry, ” he slurs, pulling away like a burned animal.

Kitsey doesn’t say anything as he leaves, and Theo doesn’t look back. With his eyes stinging in the cold he can imagine her all the same; standing below the street lamp, a pale smudge of organza in the perfect shape of a stranger.

  
  


* * *

  
  


_Decker,_

_Just got your letter. Happy New Year and many returns, etc. I have to say I envy you over in the big city. It’s just so damn quiet in Virginia. Not a lot of work to go around, either, which means mostly I’m drinking. Once I scrape together some money I’ll come visit you — and yes, that’s a threat._

_To answer your question, I haven’t heard from Pavlikovsky. I bet he’ll turn up. Knowing him he’s probably having the time of his life getting Kraut milkmaids pregnant. Maybe you could check with the VA office. They helped me get in touch with Bunny’s parents. Nice people but real lace curtain American blueblood types, as you might expect. Mostly they wanted to know how he died etc etc. They still seemed pretty broken up about it. Anyways, there’s a headstone for him in Concord, Mass, if you’re ever in that neck of the woods._

_I hope you’re doing alright. Did you get up to anything for the holidays? Did you find a pretty girl to marry yet? Write me back when you get a chance._

_Your friend,_

_Charles Macaulay_

  
  


* * *

  
  


“Are you needing anything else, sir?” 

The young man at the butcher shop register is wearing the pinched expression of someone being stared at. Theo realizes he’s the one doing the staring, and quickly averts his gaze.

“No, n-no, thank you.” 

He leaves in such a rush that he forgets his change. On the sidewalk, a woman rings a Salvation Army bell above a donation pail. Theo walks unsteadily, dazed, in the opposite direction. The cashier hadn’t looked anything like Boris. Too clean-cut and filled out, older by nearly a decade. Even the accent wasn’t quite right, all things considered; no strange Australian twang, but close enough (an unmistakably Baltic rhythm, a slight rolling of the Rs) that it rings in his head.

Theo is still waiting for it to go away, this sense of living in two places at once. When he wanders home after the bars close and it’s as dark and quiet as it ever gets in the city, his fingers still twitch for a sidearm that isn’t there. The hiss of steam from grates is the doused smoking remains of burned buildings. He rounds corners and anticipates the streets opening up into fields of lavender. Some mornings (many, most mornings) he wakes disoriented to see a plaster ceiling instead of a sky, a tree canopy, a canvas tent.

He doesn’t see ghosts. But Theo comes close, and it happens all the time. Like this: the round-faced teenage son of one of Hobie’s clients, slouched on the heels of his mother in the showroom, could be a young Bunny. A clerk with a heavy brow playing the role of Sergeant Winter in the corner of his eye. Other faces of dead men, replacements of replacements whose names he’s already forgotten if he’d ever learned them at all, strike him at odd moments. 

Of course, it’s usually Boris.

Theo has glimpsed him on street corners and in the reflections of shop windows. In the scrawny build of a man with a cigarette in the park, or a flash of dark hair just unruly enough on a boy unloading sacks of flour. Strangers, all of them, but Theo has to stop himself from running across the street with the wrong name in his mouth every time.

Eventually, he stops carrying the gold-plated lighter in his coat pocket. Theo doesn’t smoke.

  
  


* * *

  
  


A secret: when Theo can’t sleep he tries to imagine Pippa, then Kitsey, then some shameful chimera of the two. Pliant soft bodies, the delicate swell of breasts, spider silk hair fanned out. Perfume. Eggshell gasps and sighs. Women who have wanted him or who he’s tried to want in turn with his eyes squeezed shut.

Inevitably, the image collapses. It never takes very long. Gooseberry grey eyes turning black with the scent of stale tobacco, hitched breaths into the crook of Theo’s neck. The nail-bitten fingertips that latched onto his shoulders and clumsy bony elbows that stuttered laughs out into the forest.

Theo is achingly hard, the realization always a hollow-point of shame in his gut. He thinks _this isn’t how it’s supposed to be,_ even as he touches himself and twists in the sheets. And when he comes it’s with a half-stifled sob into his fist, rigid, Boris’ pale face a sigil behind his eyelids.

  
  
  
  


**xiii.**

  
  
  


Civilian life lurches forward. A year after returning home, Theo rents his own apartment. 

The one-bedroom is on the uppermost floor of a rowhouse; small, shabby, but private with windows that aren’t painted shut. Thick walls and concrete below the floorboards give it a tomblike quietness, enough that Theo can jolt awake to pace with nobody the wiser. Nobody to call on him, or rap soft knuckles against the door when he can’t quite drag himself out of bed to the classes he’s halfheartedly signed himself up for.

The building is situated between the shop and the public college; this is how he justifies it to Hobie, who asks Theo again and again if he’s sure. If he’s certain he doesn’t want to stay just a while longer. _You could take a break from the shop, it would be no trouble, perhaps you could—_

But it’s for the best. It is. Because in early March, Theo had a nightmare so violent he sent the lamp on his bedside table shattering to the floor. One of a hundred dreams like it, running through some unspecific forest while mortar and artillery fire rained down around him, splinters plunging into the earth and his skin. There had been no abrupt shift between sleep and waking; only the gradual realization that he was not where he thought he was, then dawning horror at the sight of Hobie in rumpled pajamas with paper-white skin, holding fast to Theo’s arms.

There are new routines and there are rules. Theo shaves and brushes his teeth even when he has nowhere to be. He doesn’t drink before it gets dark. For the most part, he takes his pills as prescribed. He keeps the place clean and buys respectable secondhand furniture. He opens the windows on warm days.

Theo is halfway through two fingers of bourbon when he receives his first visitor. A brisk knock on the door sends his spine bolting straight, eyes darting around the room. It’s dark; he’d forgotten to turn the lights on when he arrived home. The knocking sounds again as he scrambles to flip switches and smooth his messy hair, making sure the pill bottle is in his pocket and not on the table before he answers the door.

He doesn’t know what he expected, but it isn’t his landlady’s daughter. Theo doesn’t even know her name, although he’s seen her a thousand times; always curled up on the vestibule bench with the telephone pressed fast to her ear, murmuring to whoever it is that sullen teenage girls murmur to. 

“Hullo,” she greets him briskly, “I apologize if I woke you, but you have a telephone call.”

“Oh, uh.” Theo blinks hard and stands up straight. “Ah, thank you, you didn’t. A call from who?” 

The girl’s loafers squeak as she peers over his shoulder in an unsubtle appraisal of the apartment. Whatever she observes (curtains drawn, sparse furniture, liquor bottle) clearly doesn’t impress her, and she turns her attention back to Theo.

“I felt it would be impolite to _ask_ ,” she informs with a sniff. “I’d really be obliged if you’d get it, though, because I’m waiting on a call of my own.”

“Of course. I — yes, of course. Uh. Did they say what they’re calling in regards to?”

“I think he said he was from the Army. Not a bill collector, if _that’s_ what you’re worried about. Come, this way.”

He follows the girl down the stairs and into the hall, where she gestures to the receiver sitting off the cradle on a bench. All Theo can hear is a drumbeat in his ears that sounds like _Boris, Boris, Boris,_ because he’s had this dream before. Every variation of it. Boris calling. Boris appearing in the Manhattan throng and saying _Potter! Long time, no? Did you hear, they’re shipping us back over, will be late if we do not hurry up,_ the sick relief at learning that coming home was the dream after all.

“Hello?” His greeting comes out strangled and weak. The neighbor girl casts him a sour look down the corridor but, satisfied, departs. _Boris, Boris, Boris._

“Decker, how do you do,” comes Winter’s rough voice instead, “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Charles is buried beneath a dogwood tree on his family’s property in Virginia. His death was quick, Theo is told: a drunken automobile accident at such speed that, when the car crumpled against the grain silo, Charles probably didn’t know what was happening. He might have felt like he just kept going. 

It’s difficult to hear the service over the cicadas. The breeze that sweeps over the graveside is a collar-itching warm, but Theo finds himself sweatless and numb to it. He carries the casket with the other pallbearers and watches as it’s lowered into the earth like a spectator, through opera glasses. 

Death feels somehow less real in peacetime than it had at war, and there’s a twist of irony in that. _It’s just that I don’t know what to do anymore,_ Charles said in Berlin, after Boris and Theo put him to bed. Theo throws his fistful of dirt but doesn’t lean over to look down at the pine box. He’ll spill if he looks. 

When the pastor’s eulogy ends and the Lord’s Prayer is recited, Sergeant Winter hands the folded flag to Charles’ sister. Theo is preoccupied with the sight of them. Camilla had been immediately recognizable among the mourners, older than she'd been in the photograph in Berlin. But hair the same flaxen color as her brother's, familiar freckled cheeks wet with tears. She clutches the flag to her chest like somebody's going to snatch it away again.

Sergeant Winter is a stiff upright monument in his dress uniform. He says a few words to Camilla in the same low, quiet voice he had used on the telephone with Theo. Seeing him again is a shock, at how he’s aged backwards. How had he seemed so much older in Europe? Now, cleanly shaven, he’s young again; not even thirty. Not old enough, surely, for another burial. He approaches Theo as the gravesite empties out. Winter’s eyes are wide, unblinking up close.

“Theodore. I’ve got to get back to Washington. I just wanted to tell you goodbye, and that I’m very glad you could make it,” he says.

“Yeah. You too,” Theo replies, because if he keeps talking the words will gum up in his throat. Neither of them will say Charles’ name. It hangs between them clearly enough.

For a moment it looks like Winter is going to say something else. Instead, he jerks a tight nod and turns to leave. _If we see each other again_ _,_ Theo thinks, _if we see each other again_ _it'll be at another funeral._ So he reaches out to grasp the sleeve of his jacket and spits it out:

“Wait. Just, um, before you go. I was wondering if you knew where Bor— where Pavlikovsky is.”

Winter looks around as though expecting to find Boris in the congregation. He shakes his head, distant and pained, “No. I tried to reach him about the funeral. I only know that he isn’t in the Army anymore. All the records are a bit of a mess right now. I couldn't even tell you if he returned to the States, actually.”

The world tilts at that. Wherever Boris is, he ought to know; he’d loved Charles as much as any of them. The back of Theo’s mind buzzes with every violent possibility: maybe Boris is dead too, maybe he’d lied about reenlisting, lied about everything. The latter is almost worse. It wouldn’t be better to bury all of them, although it would be easier. Looking into Winter’s face, Theo is gripped by an impulse to crush him into a hug if only to be sure he’s real — but it’s gone as soon as it comes, and Theo’s arms hang at his sides. 

“Right. I understand. Thank you, Sergeant.”

“It’s just Henry now,” Winter corrects. “I hope you do find him. The two of you—“ he pauses, considering. “I should have told you back then, but I never felt there was anything wrong in it. Please take care of yourself, Theodore.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


For the first time in years, Theo dreams of his father.

They’re in the car. One of Larry’s outlandish purchases after a streak of wins, money green paint job with a leather interior. That late strange hour of the night when every street on Staten Island is asleep. Long blocks of split twin houses like white and red brick ghosts in the dark, looming quiet beyond plots of grass before they disappear entirely. 

This isn’t how it really happened, probably, but it is how Theo has always imagined it. Filled-in details in lieu of knowing what his father felt in those last few minutes. If he was scared or maybe just resigned or if he meant to crash at all. If he’d been going fast enough that, when the time came, it just felt like he kept going. 

The wheels groan and the car begins to drift. His father rights it, then lets it drift again. Drift, swerve. He does this a few times, as though working up his courage. Theo tears his eyes from the road only to find that it isn’t his father at all, but Charles’ profile staring out into the night.

_Are you ready?_ he asks, and Theo nods. He knows the important part; he knows what happens next.

  
  


**xiv.**

  
  


Theo has, in more sentimental moments, imagined his return to _The Goldfinch._ Vague fantasies of standing in front of it as an old man at the Mauritshuis, having lived a full and happy life. The little bird would greet him as an old friend. There would be a dignified glossing of the eyes and maybe a silent farewell. It would become the sole thing he remembered of the war.

That isn’t how it happens. He finds the bird in the newspaper he picks up on his way home from the shop, nestled in a column on an interior spread.

In bold grotesque letters, the headline and subhead read: **IN SEARCH OF LOST ART: As Allied forces take inventory of Nazi plunder, the whereabouts of many looted masterpieces remain a mystery.**

The attendant picture is dark and barely three inches tall. His first instinct is to laugh, because the paper has printed the very same grainy black and white reproduction from his mother’s old book. _How stupid,_ Theo thinks half-hysterically. _How stupid, they never took a better picture of it, and now they never will._

Beyond that the article is brief. There’s some real estate devoted to a Fabritius write-up and the painting’s pre-war provenance. _It traveled between monasteries until the liberation of Paris, where it was last accounted for in the town of Garches under the care of partisans._ A grim listing of other major missing works and, finally, a solicitation for any relevant information.

They won’t find it. For whatever reason, Theo is as certain of this as he’s ever been certain of anything; that the world tends to entropy, and beautiful things are only ever lucky enough to be pulled from the wreckage once. It's another kind of death. He might have been one of the last people to see it.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Charles and Bunny are in the ground and Theo is above it, not quite floating or standing. 

For a while, he was at the bar. He tries not to drink habitually, but some nights — tonight — are so much worse than the others, everything feeling closer than it should be, each shadow on the wall too large, two hands that won’t stop shaking, and so there’s nothing to do but raise glass after glass to his lips until the ice stops chittering together. There were two pills in there somewhere, between the first shot and the bartender (a nice man, old and soft around the middle like Hobie) suggesting he head home.

That is to say he finds himself spectacularly drunk, propped up in the hall and considering the insurmountable task of the staircase to his floor. The pills always take a while to kick in but they find him now, lead limbs colliding with the manic giddiness of his buzz.

Theo sits on the telephone bench and works the dial with clumsy fingers. Roughly twenty years pass before the operator puts him through to the right hall (“I have a Pem _broke_ house here, not Pem _brook”),_ but finally the line clears.

“Good evening, who may I ask is calling?” sing-songs the girl who picks up. It isn’t her, Theo doesn’t know why he thought it would be, sitting up and willing some sense of sobriety back into the muscles of his face.

“Good evening, ah, I need to speak to — I’m hoping to speak to Pippa.”

“Pippa? You mean Philippa.”

Indignant, Theo’s gut twists. He wants to hiss that _nobody really calls her that, nobody, you don’t know her at all._ “Yes, Philippa Blackwell.”

“Uh-huh. Well, y’know, we’re all going to bed soon,” the girl huffs, “but I’ll try to get her for you. Just hang on.”

There’s a shuffling and then the ambient melody of the sorority house; distant talking, floorboards creaking. It feels like a lifetime. Theo pinches himself in another attempt to sober up, afraid suddenly that she’ll know. He was drunk the last time she saw him. God, the last time—

“Hello?” 

Her voice is an orchestra of bells. It might be the most perfect sound in the world, and for a moment Theo’s reply catches in his throat. What is he going to say? He hadn’t thought that far ahead. He’d just needed to hear her. The impulse to slam the phone back on the cradle bubbles up and fades just as quickly; other girl’s giggles muffle and die away in the background. Pippa whispers something, heated, away from the receiver. Theo tries to imagine where she is, the oak-paneled room of her dormitory. Ever-tired eyed, flannel nightgown with her hair in rag curls — paprika red, still more vivid by way of memory.

“Pippa, it's me,” he breathes. “How are you, Pip?”

“Theo? God, hi, I'm fine. What is it? Has something happened? Is Hobie alright?” Her tone is all wrong, a little frightened, and he shakes his head before he remembers she can’t see him.

“No, no, everybody’s alright. Nothing happened. Nothing at all.” Theo’s own voice is slurred but it doesn’t matter. Now that they’re talking he’s buzzing with warmth, dizzy and incandescent.

“Are you sure? I mean, it’s really late, I thought there must be an emergency. I’m getting ready for bed.” Then, hushed: “You sound a bit… Are you drunk?”

“Yeah. Or yes, no, I’m sure, and only a little,” he answers. Curls up on the bench, legs pulled up tight to his chest to keep everything from spilling out. “Listen, you have to know that I didn’t mean to act that way. At Hobie’s. I didn’t mean to cut my hand or scare you or anything like that.”

Theo knows how he must sound, bringing up an evening that happened a year ago. But Pippa needs to know and he has to say it. Why didn’t he ever say it before? How could he have possibly gone all this time without calling her?

“I know you didn’t,” she replies gently, “I’m just worried about you.”

The vestibule spins. He should lie down. Maybe he’s too happy, and that’s why his heart is clenching like a fist, or maybe splitting open. _This isn’t a mistake,_ Theo thinks. They’d held each other together once, hadn’t they, after the bomb? And doesn’t that mean something?

“Theo? Are you still there?”

“Yeah, yes,” he forces out. Theo could tell her. He could. He could tell her that Bunny and Charles are dead. That he’s spilling. If he tried, he could even tell her about Boris. About everything that, now lost, won’t ever come back. Pippa waits for him to speak. That's what matters, the very last beautiful, impossible thing, still within reach if he can just hold on tightly enough. 

“Let’s get married,” he breathes, “Pippa, please, because — I carried your picture all through Europe, your school picture, and we understand one another, and I love you.”

And that’s true, must be, when he’s repeated it to himself so many times it feels like a part of him. When they’re the ones who made it out of the train car. Theo squeezes his wooly eyes shut. He loves her. Or he loved her once and will love her again when he remembers how, when he can just see her again. If he loves her he’ll find a way to keep her. Kitsey was never in the cards, but he could make Pippa happy. 

“Oh, Theo. You’ve just had too much to drink is all.” Whispering now. She sounds sad, why does she sound sad: “And that’s not… I adore you, you’re like my family, but you don’t know what you’re asking. You don’t mean that.”

“That’s not true. I swear I do, I know.”

Pippa continues like she hasn’t heard him, “This call must be costing you a fortune, and, and I think you ought to go to bed.”

“I do know,” he insists. “Why don’t I come to Pennsylvania and we can talk. We can talk about it in person. I’ll tell you everything. I need to see you. Just tell me, say you’ll see me and I’ll go to the station right now.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Please. Pip, I mean it.”

“Actually, I — I really have to go. I won’t tell Hobie about this, alright?”

“Wait, please—”

“Just get some sleep, okay? Goodnight.”

The line goes dead with a soft click. As Theo contemplates the drunken disaster in the dim, spinning hallway, it abruptly occurs to him that this was the only possible outcome. That he hasn’t cried since Berlin, shoulders shuddering with airless, useless sobs after Boris’ bootsteps faded and there was nobody left to bear witness to them.

  
  


* * *

  
  


A person traveling in a fast train doesn’t perceive the movement of it. Certainly, they’re aware that they _are_ moving. The reverberation of wheels and the landscape whipping by makes that much obvious. But it isn’t until the vessel comes to a very abrupt stop, by collision or by brake, that the body truly knows it; the dragging sensation overtaking the limbs, a lingering momentum that rattles the cerebellum. It’s the sudden absence of motion that makes the motion feel real at all.

The problem — and Theo has been stupid, so stupid not to understand this — is that some stops never really come. He’d crawled from the first wreckage without sea legs, off-balance, stuck in place while the earth kept spinning, until the next great force saw fit to move him again. A different course, yes, but the same basic orbit; from one vertigo to the next, still staggering like a drunk at dawn. It doesn’t stop unless Theo stops it.

Bunny’s watching from somewhere above. Not _above_ as in heaven, but physically, seated with his leg crossed at the ankle on the edge of the bathtub. Only it isn’t really him. This Bunny's face is plump and his skin is smooth, ruddy like it was when he was alive, before months of mud and gunpowder whittled him away. Theo knows a shoddy reproduction when he sees one.

He doesn’t remember curling up on the tile floor. Still wearing his shoes and his tie, both too tight as whiskey burns in his gut and the last of the pills are stuck somewhere in his throat. The more the bathroom blurs, the more Bunny seems to come into focus.

“You really are a mess, Decker.”

Theo floats and sinks at the same time. Finally slowing, stopping, all the rubble and ash coming to a rest. He’s better than fine. He feels — perfect, clean. 

“No, you’re not,” Bunny scoffs in his boarding school drawl. “You’re dying.”

That doesn’t seem right. He isn’t, he isn’t—

“Oh shut up. I happen to think it’s pathetic. Suiciding, that is. You and I should have traded places. I wanted to live.”

Theo can’t argue with that. He nods and the world nods with him, the bathroom ceiling smeared across his vision. Bunny would have made Kitsey his wife. He would have played tennis in the summer and fathered a clutch of blonde patrician babies. He wouldn’t swallow a bottle of pills or embarrass Pippa. If someone like Boris were to kiss Bunny instead of Theo, he'd have socked him in the jaw. 

“You’re right about that. I hardly have to tell you it was my body that protected you from the shrapnel. Now I’m your stupid little hallucination. It’s funny if you think about it. And pitiful, really,” Bunny sighs. “What do you think Hobie will do when he finds out you’re dead?”

Hobie thinks Theo will return in six day’s time with a — what was it? A grandfather clock, a set of chairs? He can only remember how pleased Hobie had been: _I think that’s just what you need, to get out of the city, some fresh air._ Theo’s very good at lying to people. It’s in his blood. Gambler’s blood, swindler’s blood, all his father’s, singing in his veins and sending him running from every good thing he’d ever cheated to keep.

His tongue feels swollen and heavy in his mouth like a dead thing. If Theo concentrates, he can hear the asymmetrical thump of his own heartbeat.

“Because,” Bunny continues, “it’ll be the morgue that notifies the old man whenever you’re found. And who knows when _that_ will be. Closed casket, I’d imagine, if you’re too badly decomposed. Did you even write him a note, you utter chicken?”

No, of course not. Because Theo didn’t mean to do this. If he’d meant to, he would have. He’d write one now but his body is numb and he’s drifting too thoroughly to try, ears ringing and each blink much longer than the last. Hobie will be heartbroken at first, sure, but not forever. He’ll still have Pippa. He’ll throw himself into his work, sell chests and servers to all the newlywed couples, and in time Theo will become a distant memory. 

“Is that what you think? For his sake, I hope so. And you’ve certainly scared off Kitsey and Pippa well enough,” Bunny muses. “It’s a shame that you parted on such bad terms with Bolshie. Pavlikovsky. I suppose _you_ called him Boris.” 

The lights have all gone out. No, Theo's eyes are closed. He’s warm, very warm, burning up with the cold floor no match for the white phosphorus in his chest.

“You spend so much time thinking about losing things that you never really have them.”

Drift, swerve. There might be a knocking sound somewhere. Maybe there’s a landing door, an escape hatch.

“Coward.”

Yes. Even in this, Theo is a coward. And he’s afraid.

“Anyway, I’ll leave you to it. See you on the other side.”

  
  
  
  


**xv.**

  
  
  


If he’s dead it isn’t at all what he expected. Jags of light roll over and through him, the sensation of flying on his back. His mouth tastes like ash and an authoritative voice tells him to _stay still, sir._ There are colors, too. Strobes and ramping waves of blues and reds and radiant sulfurous yellows. Sounds, but muffled: disjointed snippets that collect and scatter. Time starts and stops and folds in on itself. 

Theo is nowhere and everywhere at once.

Aachen turns into the Ardennes turns into Staten Island turns into — some amalgamation of all these places, and with them a procession of faces. Everybody he’s ever known. Bunny and Charles with bloodless faces like masks, Kitsey, Hobie, even Tom Mix from boot camp. Winter’s silhouette retreating into veils of snow. His father. His mother, waving, a speck on some very distant horizon.

A cool hand flutters to rest on his temple. Theo opens his eyes to Pippa, who should be in college; she seems to glow, perfect hair cascading down her chest in curls woven with wild roses, swathed in the elegant folds of a chiton like a pre-Raphaelite Helen of Troy. 

Theo is on a train and then he is inside the jerking hulk of a Higgins boat with salt spray crusting around his mouth. He is holding the painting. The hand on his forehead is gone, and it burns for the absence.

_Please stay,_ he says, or thinks he says, but she doesn’t. Instead, a tawny-haired woman swims into view and soothes, “Just another sedative, dear.”

Then there’s nothing for a long time after. Not the dead lull of sleep, because Theo is occasionally aware that time passes; he blinks feverishly through blackness and the faltering light of what he understands, very slowly, to be a hospital room. Probably somewhere in France or England. Far enough from the front line that he can't hear jeeps or artillery.

And at the end of it all, like a bad joke, is Boris. He emerges from somewhere beyond Theo's narrow field of vision with a bemused expression. Weren't the two of them just in Paris? No. A forest. A hole in the ground. Theo tries to lift a hand but finds his arms are held down with padded leather straps.

“You were having see-shores,” Boris says. _Seizures,_ Theo’s mind supplies dimly. He doesn’t remember that. 

_Oh._

Boris sucks his teeth. “What stupid thing did you do?”

There and not-there. Cold hands cup Theo’s face and he could spill out, has spilled out, is already slipping back under as much as he wants to stay.

_I didn’t mean to._

“Bullshit, Potter.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Theo is discharged from the hospital with a red mark on his medical file that means he’ll never be given anything stronger than aspirin for the rest of his life. He leaves with nothing else to show for it but the same clothes he’d come in with, now considerately laundered and pressed, and two missing days from his life.

The doctor didn’t say the word, for which Theo is appreciative. Instead, he put it down as an accidental overdose and said as much with a hard look. _You’ll feel better now that you’re off the pills. Those idiots at the VA should have never prescribed them. But don’t do anything like that again, alright son, because next time we’ll have to commit you_. 

A young woman at the front desk asks if there’s anybody she can call to collect him. Theo declines and goes out to hail a cab. Hobart & Blackwell isn’t far, but Hobie still thinks he’s in New Hampshire. He’s waiting for Theo to return with a set of dining chairs in a few days. Actually, nobody knows. Squinting into the sun, at the busy people in their coats and hats on the street, he isn’t sure how to feel about that. It’s possible there’s nothing left to spill, the body dementia of his shaking hands having spread up to the soft tissue of his brain. It might be something like relief.

He climbs unsteadily into a taxi, his body heavy with fatigue even after 48 hours strapped to a bed. There’s something distantly shameful about it, like arriving late at a lecture or being ushered out of a bar after last call. The cabbie is an older man in a tweed work cap. Merging into traffic, he speaks with a thick Brooklyn accent, “You sick, sir? Coming from the hospital.” 

Theo’s sudden bark of laughter startles them both. “No, not sick,” he says, sheepish and then scrambling for an explanation: “It was — I was in a car crash. I hit a grain silo.”

The driver shoots him an alarmed glance in the rear-view mirror. “Huh. Didn’t know we had those in the city.” 

Not for the first time, Theo imagines himself as a stranger might see him: hair unkempt, skin sallow under a sheen of day-old sweat, the faintest sooty smudge by his lips where they’d pumped charcoal into his stomach. A hollowed-out crazy from Bellevue in the gentleman’s costume of his nice linen shirt — Charvet, a gift from Mrs. Barbour.

Theo can’t help it; he laughs again, so hard that tears form in the corners of his eyes, and says, “Me neither.”

Somewhere near the Flatiron, it occurs to Theo that he hadn’t wanted to live. But he hadn’t wanted to die, either. At least not when it came down to it, when the half-dream Bunny was gone, and Theo was alone between one place and the next with nobody to gather a fistful of his jacket and _pull._

Now there’s only time. Time to take Kitsey out dancing, to drink until he can’t see, to go to Pennsylvania and convince Pippa to love him, to reenlist, to run away and change his name and start again. To return to work and his classes and fashion some sort of life from the same rough outline of his old one, but that seems impossible now. He’s too afraid to die, and there’s nothing but time, and what does he make of that?

  
  


* * *

  
  


Theo doesn’t have to decide, as it happens. He’s almost there — almost home — when his landlady barrels out of her door to intercept him in the entry hall. It's as simple as that.

Mrs. Glass is a short, stout woman of an almost manic sociability; charming in small doses, now completely overwhelming with her huge round-eyed stare. There’s no way she doesn’t know where he’s been and why, Theo realizes. She’d very likely been the one to call the ambulance to haul him away. If she’s planning to throw him out on the street, though, it isn’t reflected in the wet kisses she plants on both of his cheeks.

“I thought that was you, dear, it’s good to see you back on your feet," she beams.

“Ma’am, I,” he stammers, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about—”

She holds up a hand. "I’m not so easily scandalized. You know, I was on the vaudeville circuit when I was a girl, we loved our parties and, well, if you ask _me_ , overdoing it once in a while is all part of being a bright young thing. Are you recovered?”

“I am, thank you.” Theo isn’t; a dull beating headache is working its way up from his jaw, threatening to become a migraine.

He manages a thin, grateful smile and turns to make his departure, but Mrs. Glass goes on, “Why don’t I make you some sandwiches? For you and your guest, I can bring them up later when you’re all settled in.”

This stops Theo short. “My guest?”

“Oh yes, I should have said. I took the liberty of letting him in, he told me you were expecting him, I do hope that’s alright,” she chatters, oblivious to Theo’s bewilderment. "You see, he'd been by your antiquary place, so I assumed he wasn't some thief. And I hope you'll pardon my saying so, but having been up there I know you haven't got much to steal! Anyhow, we had tea in my garden. What a charming young man."

“Who—”

“But tell me, where on _earth_ is that accent from? Bosnia? Or Russian, but with a twang, like...”

And, well. It’s suddenly all so obvious.

“Like Australian,” Theo offers, cotton in his mouth and in his ears.

“Yes, Aus _tralian_ , that’s exactly it.”

The momentum of time is an arbitrary thing, but its unpredictability is nearly always revealed in a slow, trawling burn. There have been few moments in Theo’s life that caught him truly off guard. Perhaps only three: the bomb, the draft letter, and the unfolding of this very instant.

Mrs. Glass must say something else as he begins to mount the staircase, but Theo doesn’t hear her — only waits for the telltale clatter of her door closing before he allows his feet to thunder up the steps two at a time, spinning off-kilter with the twin urge to run back to Bellevue and insist they readmit him, to tell them that the spilling did mean losing his mind. Theo’s heartbeat rises from a canter to a race, and he knows better than to hope, but it wells up in the pit of his insides all the same.

It might feel like relief. It might feel like some foreboding joke, this implausible quirk of fate, if Theo were to stop and deliberate. But the thing is — for the first time in so many months, the only part of him that doesn’t shake is his hands.

Theo opens the door and at the end of it all, of course, is Boris. 

Impossibly, inevitably, casually, almost two years later with a travel-worn book on his knee and a cigarette in hand, perched by the window like he’s been there all along. Theo knows it’s him as soon as their eyes meet. Is sure in the course of one exhausted instant that he could never conjure up something so accurate as that flat dark stare, the grin Theo chased because it always sat so crookedly on his face, and this too:

“There you are, Potter. Was thinking you would never show up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter CWs:** Mental instability, PTSD, seriously inadequate mental health care, internalized homophobia, alcohol/prescription drug abuse, suicide attempt.
> 
> Surprise! Not over quite yet, although I promise this is the last High Angst chapter. Hoping people are still around/reading Goldfinch fic, or at least this one. My sincerest apologies for how long it’s taken to update; personal life stuff made writing impossible for a good chunk of time. I’ve decided to split what was originally going to be the final installment in two, as it was getting incredibly long and there was a lot I didn’t want to cut. I'm sorry about the lack of Boris in this chapter, too, but I promise there’s plenty of him in the next.
> 
> Also, you can find the fic playlist [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7EuI1EztsIskIGjeH7A2bA?si=3YkvH1VxRxq9mi6hZyHteQ) if you’re at all interested in what I've been listening to while writing it. Mostly mopey-and-thematically-relevant indie, piano/string instrumentals, and a few Russian tracks because when else can I do that?
> 
> Thank you so much for your support and incredibly thoughtful, encouraging comments. They mean the world to me, and make writing for this fandom such a pleasure.


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